THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

Strong Men, proud of their enormous limbs, prognathous, beetle browed, apelike, strutted their stuff in trunks laundered for the occasion.  Dancers, beautiful as fairies, as princesses, capered and gamboled under bright lights that layered their skirts with glitter.  There was nothing but lights, dust, cries, joy, tumult; some giving, some getting, equally merry the one and the other.  Children clung to mothers’ skirts in the hope of a sugar stick, or climbed onto their fathers’ shoulder the better to see a stunning magician perform, godlike.  And swirling everywhere, above all the perfumes, an odor of frying fat, incense to this feast day.

Charles Baudelaire, “The Old Showman” in Baudelaire/Paris, 2009