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Palace of Wonders: A Very Strange Brew
"I will bite into a lightbulb and chew into the broken glass," Robbins said. "That's what D.C. needs. That's the one thing missing."
"Englert always says, 'James, you give them too much,' " Taylor says. "But I just want a place to sit and drink a beer next to the freakiest stuff in the world."
  Jill Fisher and James Taylor at the Showbar on H Street, a spinoff from Baltimore's defunct Dime Museum. (By Nikki Kahn -- The Washington Post) |
He is a sideshow purist; he isn't happy about young people who cast a condescending gaze that reduces vaudeville to an ironic relic. Re-creations of old vaudeville traveling acts like the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus are reviewed in the Village Voice and perform at the Birchmere. . At the 9:30 club, a PG-13 "Burlesque-fest" is backed by the band DeVotchKa, whose polka-rock graces the soundtrack for "Everything Is Illuminated."
"My contention about this business is that it not be just something to appeal to hipsters," Taylor says. "I pitch to the widest audience because carnival is family entertainment."
On Sundays, the place will be open for children, who may enjoy seeing the pickling jar upstairs that houses the 10-inch-high head of a python. There's a story attached, of course. At Taylor tells it, the snake was infamous for killing its owner-- Sailor Katzy, a Florida carnival showman who worked in the 1960s. Katzy's wife arrived on the scene, saw her strangled husband's body, saw the snake staring down guiltily from a tree, and called in police, screaming, "Don't touch that snake, don't touch that darn snake!" While Sailor Katzy's act had been steadily failing, his widow toured with the cold-blooded culprit -- hawking it as "The Snake That Killed Sailor Katzy."
"She made a gazillion dollars," Taylor says, almost choking up.
It's a lesson in something. Revenge? Reincarnation? Show business?
"I'm gonna make my fortune someday," Taylor muses. "They'll be touring me after I'm dead and saying, 'Here's the head of the carney who started the Palace of Wonders!'"
But first, he must survive the tough jungle of redevelopment on H Street.
