I’ve always been fascinated by the carnival and all things amusement park and local fairs. I find them wondrous, magical, scary and beautiful—all at the same time.
It’s been a dream of mine to ride the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island in Brooklyn ever since I saw the video to Please Don’t Go Girl.
The lights, the sounds and the smells of a carnival turn me around inside. There’s something nostalgic about it all. When I read The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom I couldn’t help but be whisked away and feel every emotion it conjured up.
I grew up watching scary movies. The movie Freaks scared me half to death—but something about it was relatable. Maybe I realized at a young age, I too was a freak in my own right, like Daryl Hannah in Splash.
Halloween is the one night we all get to be the things, people and creatures we’ve always wanted to be—there are no limits. This year a group of us are going out as Circus Sideshow Freaks. There will be a Ring Leader, a Clown, a Half-Woman-Half-Man and a Wolf Man, among others. I’m going to be The Bearded Lady.
Bearded ladies have been women of legend, curiosity, ridicule—even fashion. Her beard makes her the attraction, but it’s sexy, it’s mysterious, it’s something people will pay for the privilege of looking at her.
There is a raw beauty to The Bearded Lady. No smoke, no mirrors, just the presence of her own androgyny and frank sxual ambiguity.
A little history …
In ancient Egypt queens wore strap-on beards called postiches. Norse pagans worshipped the Earth goddess Friga, who was repeatedly portrayed as a woman with a beard. Many of the most well-known pagan deities, such as Aphrodite or Venus, were worshiped as having beards once.
These Bearded Ladies were Goddesses, complete, supernatural women who rose above the boundaries of our mere human existence. And their androgyny was a symbol of their own spirituality. The beard symbolized the fact that because of her divine status, Friga was able to take on both feminine and masculine characteristics at the same time.
Subsequently, what this reveals about the rest of us humans is that no matter the era, or the culture, androgyny can captivate us.
Catch Salma Hayek as Madame Truska the bearded lady in Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant in theatres on October 23.
