Johns Hopkins Magazine -- April 1998

APRIL 1998
CONTENTS

AUTHOR'S NOTEBOOK

H U M A N I T I E S A N D T H E A R T S

What's Weird Here?
Author's Notebook
By Dale Keiger

As long as I've been writing, I've been attracted to fringe characters as subjects: bounty hunters, fighters in Meanest Man contests, con artists, street performers, minor-league sports figures, composers and players of peculiar music. James Taylor and his sideshow pals fit right in. When I traveled to my staid old hometown of Cincinnati for the opening of a gallery show of carnival banners, and watched a performer named Topaz stub out a cigarette on her tongue, then contort herself face down on a bed of nails, my first thought was, Now there's a girl worth knowing.

Working with James to report the story was a hoot. I spend a lot of my professional time with humanities scholars who are interesting but not exactly what you'd call extreme. In most respects, James isn't extreme either-he works for the state of Maryland, after all-but he has an appetite for the extreme, and that makes him fun to know. We share a fascination for the truly bent.

One of his friends is The Enigma, a performer in the Jim Rose Circus, who is tattooed all over as a blue jigsaw puzzle. The Enigma is married to Katzen, a tattoo artist in Texas who is herself permanently adorned, also head to toe, as a striped cat. They make a lovely couple. The Enigma has offered to give James his first tattoo, something James is uncharacteristically timid about. So I've challenged him. I've told him that the next time the Jim Rose Circus comes to Baltimore, we have to arrange for The Enigma to tattoo both of us. I will if he will.

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