The old, weird America

IF you believe Gregory Gibson, which for the moment I'm happy to do, it all began with freak shows. American pop culture that is, from highbrow to low. I'm oversimplifying wildly of course, and so is Gibson, but for argument's sake, let's start with the "dime museums" of the 19th century -- palaces of curiosities that displayed portraits of famous men, artifacts of conquered peoples and all manner of oddities from mud turtles to mermaids. P.T. Barnum's American Museum featured a lecture room, where, for their betterment, the paying masses could view uplifting dramas, Siamese twins and a microcephalic African American from New Jersey billed as a "missing link" between man and ape.

The dramas morphed into vaudeville, the portrait halls into our finer art museums and the freak shows (perhaps) into everything else -- but first into free-standing freak shows, either carnival sideshows or independent amusement halls such as the famed Hubert's Museum, which held its ground on New York's 42nd Street until the late 1960s. This genealogy -- in which "American Idol," the Getty Center and Sealo the Seal Boy all sprout from the same root -- may be less than watertight, but it does explain a lot.

Gibson's story starts with a black man named Richard Charles "Charlie" Lucas. He is perhaps the most intriguing figure in "Hubert's Freaks," which is saying quite a bit. During the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, Charlie Lucas presided over the "Darkest Africa" exhibit as "African Chief of the Duckbill Women," a.k.a. "WooFoo, the Immune Man." He wore a bone through his nose and swallowed fire. (The fair that year celebrated, without irony, a "Century of Progress.") He and his wife, the beautiful Woogie, eventually settled in New York, and Lucas found work managing Hubert's Museum, where Woogie performed her snake-charming act alongside the aforementioned Sealo, Professor Heckler's Flea Circus, Mildred the Alligator Skin Girl, a Russian midget named Andy Potato Chips and Eddie Carmel, the Jewish Giant.

Not incidentally, Lucas was befriended there by photographer Diane Arbus, who talked her way into the homes of his colleagues and shot what would later become iconic photos of, among others, Andy Potato Chips with two other midgets in his Uptown living room and Eddie Carmel bent beneath the ceiling of his Bronx apartment, his parents looking like frightened Lilliputians beside him.