To Soar, To Spin, To Sew, Today
Marilyn Cohen
With nimble fingers,
she stitches dazzling costumes
like those she once wore
when she performed in the ring.
Her name is Mireille
and she is a child of the circus.
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| Born in Algiers, she is the daughter of two circus families. At 16, her French mother, Evelyn Theron, ran away with Adolf Zerbini, an Italian clown. When he died tragically under the wheels of a train, Evelyn took her two daughters home to France and her family of circus cyclists.
Mireille was 12 when the Theron Troupe came to America. On cycles, arms linked, eight riders across, she and her mother and sister and cousins and aunts and uncles circled the ring at dizzying speeds.
Uncle Billy, who loved all things American, did a Wild West act on a cycle with a lasso and whip.
Uncle Guy, with fake Groucho marx mustache and Legionnaire's uniform, rode a high wheeler, with a miniature back wheel and a front wheel as tall as a man. Mireille, in spangles and tights, rode on top of a three-rider column on the world's tiniest bike.
She rode horses and elephants and balanced high atop a breakaway sway pole with the Clyde Beatty Circus. It was there she met and married Julian Arnosi, a catcher with a teeterboard act who had come to America from Spain, where his father had lost his circus when Franco came to power, and his mother, a marquese, had lost her title when she married the circus man.
Now, the children of the performer-turned-seamstress wear costumes she sews. Mia, Jean-Paul and Jean-Pierre, like their mother before them, defy gravity – on a trapeze, high atop a sway pole and as a human cannonball respectively.
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