Witness the Strange, Odd, Bizarre and Unusual

Electric Sideshow brings carnival arts to Knoxville with all-ages benefit event

Steak and vegetable kabobs were sizzling on the grill for a Drunk Brunch event at Host Clothing one recent Sunday afternoon as dozens of Knoxvillians lounged around the space sipping beers, playing board games and consulting a Ouija board.

The lazy Sunday fun took an interesting turn as Baron Von Geiger, a big dude with multiple tattoos and piercings, removed his shirt to invite bystanders to use a staple gun to attach dollar bills to his body. The Host crowd is not faint of heart, and before long Von Geiger had at least $40 stapled to his chest, forehead, back, arms and legs.

He’s known as the Pain-Proof Strongman, with the ability to not only withstand multiple staples to the face, but also to bend solid steel bars and lie on beds of nails. He holds the record for the world’s strongest ears, having lifted 100 pounds with his pierced ears, and he calls Knoxville home. Von Geiger and partner Lenore Patryn have brought their Electric Sideshow act to town, with an upcoming event June 28 at Body Graffix, 3712 Walker Blvd., to benefit the Cancer Fund of America and breast cancer research.

Patryn is a New Jersey native who swallows swords, manipulates fire and walks on broken glass, with training from the Coney Island sideshow school and years of performing with circuses and carnivals under her belt.

In a culture where Americans are often desensitized to shock value and violence, Patryn says audience members are fascinated by the chance to see something they’ve never seen before.

“People are either going to like or not, it’s not for everybody, but at least they take the time to see if they’ll enjoy it,” she says. “They think, ‘This person is going to do something strange and I can’t watch, but I want to know what’s going to happen’ — if you pay to see the show, you should see the show.”

Patryn caught the sideshow bug as a child when a carnival visited her elementary school (“I remember looking out the window watching them set up and thinking it was so much cooler than what I was doing, learning boring stuff,” she says) and later as an audience member at Coney Island chosen to stand on the Strong Man as he lay on a bed of nails.

“I remember looking out at everyone and thinking, ‘This is awesome, I could really do this,’” she says.

Over the next few years Patryn attended the sideshow school, gave small performances for friends, collected piercings and tattoos and traveled with carnivals before joining an act in Philadelphia where she met Von Geiger and Electric Side Show was born.

Not just a sideshow performer but a historian of the art form, Patryn’s love for her work is evident as she rattles off interesting facts about the evolution of the circus and sideshow acts: George Washington’s cousin John Rickerts presented the first circus in Philadelphia to showcase equestrians’ skills, building a tent called a “circus” to protect the audience from the elements; European circuses incorporated ballet and plays, later adding menageries of animals and clowns to the show; the first exhibition of human beings was in the late 1800s when a side wall of a main circus tent was sectioned off to display human oddities and people with abnormalities; sideshow acts often made more money than the circus managers and main-tent performers — Gen. Tom Thumb had a mansion in New Jersey and made a small fortune from his performances.

Von Geiger says he doesn’t experience pain during his stapling act, although he won’t let anyone staple the bottom of his feet after a painful experience during a previous show, and he says he knows the limitations of allowing audience members to staple certain areas on his forehead, neck and kidneys.

Patryn says during her years of sword swallowing, fire manipulating and walking on glass, she has only suffered minor nicks and cuts, but acknowledges the dangers involved in her work.

“Everything we do is real, nothing is a trick, so with everything we do there’s a bit of danger, particularly with sword swallowing — 30 people have died, people have been injured, so it’s not an illusion, but we don’t want to tell how we do it because it breaks the onstage magic that we’re seemingly ordinary people who can do extraordinary things,” she says. “I don’t find anything I do incredibly painful, maybe there’s a little discomfort with glass walking, but if I ever did anything that made me uncomfortable I would stop right then and there because no one should put themselves at risk. We do everything in a safe manner.”

Von Geiger is scheduled to pull a Geo Metro with his ears at the all-ages benefit, and hardcore bands Amidst the Mannequins, Three Random Words, Bloodlust & Battery and This House is a Morgue will also join Electric Sideshow at the event.

“Some people see this as an expensive hobby, but it’s my life,” Patryn says. “I enjoy it when people take the time to notice and talk to me about how I did [my act] — It gives me great joy to think I could do weird things and have people boggle their mind.”