Orton's Badger Circus (1854)

A photo is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”

-- Diane Arbus 1923-71: Patricia Bosworth “Diane Arbus: a Biography” (1985)

Above painting by Charles Seliger, color photo, Harriet McBryde Johnson, B/W photo by Irving Penn.

What follows is a quote from William Grimes’ NYTimes’ 10/14/09 obituary describing Dickie Peterson’s singing style (vocalist and bass player for Blue Cheer):

“Pitted against Paul Whaley’s savagely thrashing drums and Leigh Stephens’s screeching guitar, Mr. Peterson, the group’s lead singer, adopted the only possible vocal strategy: he opened his mouth wide and emitted primal sounds at top volume.”

Next, an excerpt from Douglas Martin’s 10/13/09 Ben Williams obituary (circus performer) concerning Williams’s relationship with his life long partner, a Burmese elephant, named Anna May:

“Anna May, a stunningly intelligent beast, liked most people but fell hard for young Ben. She liked to hoist him high in the air with her trunk. By the 1970s, they were a hit act. 'She raised him, really,' Mr. Williams’s mother said in an interview on Wednesday. Mr. Williams returned the love, as was dramatically evident in 1982, when a 30-year-old woman in Wisconsin sneaked into a trailer where Anna May was sleeping. The startled elephant swatted the woman with her trunk, killing her. Mr. Williams panicked and fled with Anna May. He was worried that the authorities would kill the elephant, as often happens to animals that kill humans, however inadvertently, Mrs. Woodcock said. After initially being charged with murder, Mr. Williams was convicted of leaving the scene of an accident. He spent two weeks in jail.”

Finally, an excerpt from Peter Singer’s NYTimes years end obituary essay on Harriet McBryde Johnson (see color photo above):

“My lecture, ‘Rethinking Life and Death,’ was a defense of the position that had aroused such vehement opposition. I pointed out that physicians routinely withdraw life support from severely disabled newborns, and I argued that this is not very different from allowing parents to decide, in consultation with their doctors, to end the life of a baby when the child has disabilities so serious that the family believes this will be best for the child or for the family as a whole. When I finished, Johnson, who was born with a muscle-wasting disease, spoke up. I was saying, she pointed out, that her parents should have been permitted to kill her shortly after her birth. But she was now a lawyer, enjoying her life as much as anyone. It is a mistake, she said, to believe that having a disability makes life less worth living….According to her sister, Beth, what most concerned Harriet about dying was ‘the crap people would say about her.’ And sure enough, among the tributes to her were several comments about how she can now run and skip through the meadows of heaven. Doubly insulting, first because Johnson did not believe in a life after death, and second, why assume that heavenly bliss requires you to be able to run and skip?”