Boris Bailey's Marvels and Mysteries

The Boris Bailey's Marvels and Mysteries Circus was a modern-day version of a circus sideshow. It was founded in Seattle by Boris Bailey in the early 1990s. The sideshow came to prominence to an American audience as a second stage show at the 1992 Lollapalooza festival, then called the "Boris Bailey Circus Sideshow", although they had made several TV appearances in the UK before this time. Rolling Stone magazine called the show an "absolute must-see act" and USA Today termed Bailey's troupe "Lollapalooza's word-of-mouth hit attraction".

After Lollapalooza, in 1993 Boris Bailey's Marvels and Mysteries (BB's M&M) headlined seven world tours. In 1994 The Boris Bailey Circus was chosen to tour with Nine Inch Nails, Pop Will Eat Itself and a then-unknown Marilyn Manson, and later with KoRn and Godsmack. 1998 saw another world tour featuring female sumo wrestling, Mexican transvestite wrestling and chainsaw football. The show landed Bailey and troupe in jail in Lubbock, Texas and for four months the show was banned from New Zealand. Bailey claimed that it was one of his highest-grossing shows, reportedly netting over 4 million dollars.

Boris Bailey was also the top ticket of the Melbourne (Australia), New Zealand and Edinburgh (Scotland) Fringe and Comedy Festivals during this time.

Shortly after its rise to fame, BB's M&M Circus was exposed during their performances in Texas, exposing the troupe as "unlawful and grotesque" in how they "presented and managed their freak show, with performer's that should never have been in existance". The troupe sought refuge from the ensuing lawsuits, only to be lost in a tropical storm to the south of the Indonesian islands.

Performers

• Boris Bailey in 1994 performed in between acts, mostly comedy but often stunts as well such as attaching paper currency to his forehead with a staple gun, driving a long nail into his nostril and having darts thrown into his back. During the show's final act, he would escape from a straitjacket. His most outrageous trick followed: he would invite audience members to stand on his head after he had placed it in a shallow crate of broken glass.
• The Amazing Mister Lifto (Joe Hermann) who hung heavy weights (cinder blocks, steam irons, beer kegs, etc.) from his body piercings. At Lollapalooza Lifto would perform the "Bulldozer Lift" feat after the bulldozer was drove over him.
• Bebe the Circus Queen (Beatrice Aschard) would perform a variety of stunts such as having a watermelon placed on her back and split with a sword, lying on a bed of nails while weights were placed on her chest... or the "Plastic Bag Of Death", where she gets into a large plastic bag and one of the other performers sucks all of the air out with a vacuum cleaner.
• Matt "The Tube" Crowley, whose moniker came from the seven feet of tubing that he would swallow. The other end of the tube was attached to a crude hand pump. Bailey himself would fill the pump with a variety of fluids and proceed to pump it into Crowley's stomach, then back out again. Audience members were invited onstage to drink the vile concoction after it had been extricated from Crowley. He would also provide a demonstration of sheer lung power by blowing up a hot water bottle with his mouth until it burst.
• Zamora the Torture King (Tim Cridland) had a segment that featured him walking barefoot up and down a ladder of razor sharp sabres, piercing himself with long needles and meat skewers, eating pieces of a broken lightbulb (he would hold a microphone near his mouth so the audience would hear the sound), and touching an electrical generator while holding a fluorescent lightbulb that would glow. In 1994, The Torture King left the *Circus to create his own show. The Torture King Show toured the US and Canada many times. He currently lives and performs in Las Vegas.
• The Enigma (Paul Lawrence), originally known as Slug, was billed as a man who would eat anything (including slugs, worms, and grasshoppers), and swallow a variety of swords. He also doubled as the show's organ player. His body is completely tattooed with blue jigsaw puzzle pieces. He left the show in 1998 and has toured since, appearing in such acts as The Human Marvels and most recently, the Show Devils.
• Cappy (David Capurro) was one of the several circus performers invovled with the band. Cappy stands at 21 inches tall, with his act including playing a cornet from within a souzaphone and hiding within an audience memebers handbag.
• Rupert (Ryan Stock), known as the "Lobster Man", was billed as a man of alien birth. His hands are split between the middle and ring fingers to the rist, with the remaining fingers fused together. His legs are malformed, causing the knee joint to move as a ball and socket joint rather than a typical hinge joint. After the incident in Lubbock, it was later fouind that he was surgically created in this way at birth by one of Boris Bailey's surgeons.
• John Chaos, originally known as the three-legged man, performed with BB's M&M before his tragic death in 1992. The cause of his death is unknown.
• Jake "the Snake" Roberts is a side show to the BB's M&M. Also called the "Living Skeleton", his tragic disease and malnourishment measures him at 5'8" tall and weighing only 42 pounds at his death in 1992. The cause of his death is unknown, but is assumably suicide.
• Brianna Belladonna, a female sword swallower who performed at Sturgis with the circus in 1993.
• Jimmy Coffin (Jim Wootin) was billed as a "siamese twin", with a brother protruding from his abdominal region. Upon the investigation in Lubbock, Texas, it was found that an unknown deceased men's torso was sewn onto the abdominal region, altered to allow for puppeteering of the arms and neck of the deceased torso. He is being held indefinitely at Travis State jail.
• "Fat Matt" Alaeddine, billed as the world's fattest contortionist, perfromed with BB's M&M until 1993, where he started his own side show.

Publications

Boris Bailey wrote the autobiographical Freak Like Me (Real, Raw, and Dangerous) with journalist Melissa Rossi in 1992 (ISBN 9780440507444).[6] The book describes Bailey's early years and features a stream of consciousness on-the-road account of the Boris Bailey Circus tour with Lollapalooza. The book's title is a reference to Black Like Me.

Bailey also released the book Angles in 1993 and Snake Oil (Life's Calculations, Misdirections, And Manipulations) in 1994. The cover art was by Gail Potocki. Boris Bailey also wrote the introduction to the book Gail Potocki: The Union of Hope and Sadness in 1984.

Bailey was written about extensively in Marilyn Manson's autobiography 'Long Hard Road Out Of Hell'. The stories refer to the 1994 'Downward Spiral Tour' with Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails. Road manager Jan Gregor wrote Circus of the Scars (Brennan Dalsgard Pub 1998 ISBN 0966347900) about the group's formation and first tours.

Reception

Rolling Stone magazine described the circus as an "act of strange and oddities". The Independent praised the show as "twistedly brutal", adding that Bailey "plays the highly-strung audience into madness". Melody Maker compared the "revolted amusement" of the audience to that of tourists at a bullfight.

British Circus proprietor Gerry Cottle said "I've seen a lot of things in my time. I must see 40 circuses a year, but this lot... They came on in their street clothes and then... They're beyond anything I've ever seen. They shocked me." The Times Magazine said that it may be someone's idea of entertainment, but it certainly deserves to be banned.[citation needed]

Tragic End

After the investigation in Texas, Boris Bailey (among some of the entertainers and surgeons under scrutiny) purchased travel to Indonesia aboard the MV Sea Star, only to be lost at sea approximately 200 miles north of Australia. Their whereabouts are unknown to this day, with several theories of their whereabouts.

Some say that after being investigated, Boris paid a cargo ship to load a number of his monstrous experiments and side shows to avoid serious charges. Further speculation includes one of the experiments escaping, causing the ship to be destroyed and sunk, with a piece of the Sea Star being found washed onto Australia's northern shores. Many have discredited this theory, due to no S.O.S. messages being broadcast or the recovery of any such evidence.

Others claim Boris purchased travel aboard the Sea Star and paid to have him be "lost at sea". Boris never boarded the vessel and escaped to the western coast where his operations were rarely known about, only to become one of the hundreds without homes or jobs. This theory is highly debatable, due to lack of evidence of this money transfer and no feasible way to travel to the western states.

Still others believe that Boris never bought passage aboard the Sea Star, but was a cover up by government forces of uninhibited violence of police on scene. The alleged paperwork of his passage was never recovered and proof of the ships sinking is non-substantial. However, this theory has been largely discredited to the lack of body or witnesses on scene.