Family carnival inspires Independent Study

Yes, my family owns a carnival.† No, there are no bearded ladies or dancing moneys, I don’t smell like cabbage and the fact that I can juggle is completely irrelevant.† After enduring years of ridicule and bizarre questions, my Independent Study gave me the opportunity to finally set the record straight.† Being a history major, my topic ideas were endless, but rather than bore advisors with another analysis on the Dreyfus Affair, I decided to work with something a little more unique.† My I.S. examined the enduring appeal of the American carnival throughout the past century.

I’m not sure if people realize that there are limited scholarly materials published on the history of the carnival industry.† As I struggled to pick facts out of the three whole books I found about carnivals, I faced a dilemma: I didn’t have nearly enough information to write an entire thesis.† And then it hit me.† If I couldn’t find the facts in books, I’d go straight to the source of it all: the carnies.† The fact that I literally had a carnival in my backyard gave me the perfect opportunity to begin my search for the truth.

Obviously I was going to have to interview people, but just to spice things up a little bit more, I decided that I wouldn’t just film these interviews to get information for my text ó I decided to film interviews and make a movie?

The carnival is all about the sights and sounds anyway, so why would I want to turn in some 60 pages of black and white letters when I was working with a world of colors, lights and that annoying jingle from the merry-go-round?

So I spent my summer hearing about “back in the day” and how much everything has changed.† When I got to school and began watching my footage to find out what the appeal of the carnival was, I realized that in actuality, not much had changed throughout the past 50 years.† Even though my interviewees emphasized change, the changes they talked about dealt with insurances, regulations, health inspections and recordkeeping.† All of those changes were unnoticed by the public who were riding the same rides that their parents rode and eating funnel cake derived from a recipe that hadn’t changed for 50 years.† This revelation led to my thesis, which was that the appeal of the carnival lies in the sameness of the attractions. I analyzed the social, political and technological changes during the 1960s, seventies and eighties and how those changes affected the way people were entertained.

In an evolving society that continually demands the bigger, faster and fancier, the carnival is one of the few institutions whose attraction revolves around its unchanging amusements and the nostalgia for those amusements. The carnival offers an escape from the chaos and stresses of everyday life, bringing all the fun right into the community.

Using film as a supplement to my writing allowed me to show the viewers exactly what I was talking about.† Seeing small children giggle as they slid down the fun slide, cotton candy spinning in the machines and the rainbow of blinking lights that cut through the night sky brought back the memories of fun that keep people coming back to the carnival year after year.† So by simply watching my film, viewers should be able to see and feel the attraction that I believe is the reason for carnivals’ continued popularity.

Thank goodness carnivals are so happy and fun because I really don’t know how I would have been able to finish my I.S. if I didn’t love them so much.

But no matter how much you love your topic, after that eighth or ninth all-nighter you hit a wall and the passion for your topic turns to rage and then indifference. Your vocabulary starts to diminish and you can type the word carnival faster than you can type your name because you have typed it 4,648 times.

But in those final minutes as you debate whether or not to hit the print button because you can’t fathom the idea that you may actually be done, a new feeling hits you: you never have to look at this thing ever again. And that feeling is a feeling that every senior can appreciate.