ALBANY, N.Y. — Some moms stay home. Some moms report to an office.
And some moms, the wives of tiger tamers, perform acrobatics while suspended by their hair 30 feet above awestruck cotton-candy- eating audiences.
Andrea Raffo’s the last type of mom.
She’s a fifth-generation circus performer who, along with her husband, Daniel, the animal tamer, and 4-year-old son Davian, travels with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.
In the circus, there’s no distinct line between family life and work life. School’s in session with a traveling teacher among elephants and entertainers. Parents look out for each other while practicing for the show. Home is on the road.
“It’s kind of like what my parents went through. This is your life. This is your business. You love what you do, and so you just go on with your life, and you have a family,” says Raffo, whose mother was also an aerialist who hung by her hair and whose father performed a low-wire act.
“You try to evolve your life around what you do,” she says, “and it works.”
It’s just that instead of worrying about Davian talking to strangers or playing with matches, she has to make sure he follows the rules when Daddy works with the tigers.
Everything else remains pretty typical. He has a bedtime routine (but his bed is in an RV for most of the year instead of the family’s home in Florida). He gets to run errands with Mom between shows, and he spends his parents’ work days at the Ringling Bros. “nursery,” where he learns the basics with the other preschoolers.
But as his mom did during her childhood, Davian also gets to see the world, checking out museums and tourist sites between performances.
He’s a little too young to start training, but, Raffo thinks, given his high energy, he has the makings of a pretty good tumbler (or animal tamer, if he chooses his father’s path).
Other moms who travel with Ringling Bros. are already schooling their kids in the art of the circus.
Maria Garcia, who performs the “Queen of the Clouds Comedy Trapeze” act with Ringling Bros., has two daughters, 12-year-old Shannon and 8-year-old Kelly Marie, who are training to become tumblers.
They go to school full time and train with Garcia, some Chinese acrobats and Brazilian dancing girls from the show. But like most tweens, they have to be pushed a little, Garcia says.
“You know kids, they want to play more than they train. Now, I’ve been quite strict about it, and they’re getting used to it,” says Garcia, a widower whose husband, also a trapeze artist, died after he was injured in a fall (not with Ringling Bros.).
“With kids, it’s like, everything: If you don’t push them to brush their teeth at night or to have a shower, then they don’t,” Garcia says. “It’s the same thing with training.”
But when every day is about cotton candy and clowns, how do you ground a wayward circus kid, anyway?
Like most kids.
Take away their iPod or computer, and you’ve shattered their world, even when they’re part of the “greatest show on Earth.”
