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 Friday, September 12, 2008 10:22 AM CDT |
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That woman between you and those 6 circus tigers? She's only 22
Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey comes to Coliseum this week
BLOOMINGTON -- We've all heard of a tiger in your tank. But one in your bathtub? Your bed? Your lap? Your face? Meet Vicenta Pages, who’s had a tiger in all of those places, and more. That’s because, at 22, she’s one of the world’s youngest tiger trainers and tamers. | Video: Behind the scenes at the Coliseum | Circus lineup | Interactive graphic: Coliseum finances, attendance More to the point, she’s perhaps the world’s only female tiger trainer/tamers barely out of her teens. Vicenta definitely holds a unique spot on the kingly Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus roster, where her youth has no peers in this regal realm. As part of the circus’ new touring show, “Boom A Ring,” in town tonight through Saturday at the U.S. Cellular Coliseum, Vicenta will be seen all over the place, literally. She’s the hostess of the “All Access Pre-Show,” that popular preliminary event that allows audiences to get behind the scenes and up-close-and-personal with performers and critters. She’s a high-flying trapeze artist in one of “Boom A Ring’s” neck-craning aerial acts. And, last but not least, she’s the only human in a cage with six, count ’em, six, white tigers. It hasn’t hurt her career trajectory any that Vicenta was born into the fifth generation of a famed circus family — the Pages circus dynasty, which originated in Cuba and moved to the United States in the 1960s as Jorge’s Circus Pages. Thus, growing up in a circus family has meant a lifelong familiarity with and love for everything she’s doing now as a young woman. She was on a trapeze, she recalls, by age 1; at 4 she was performing on a trampoline with her parents in public; by 8, she was in public as a solo act, performing with four ponies. That sounds normal enough, at least when compared to her tiger-training destiny. But, says Vicenta, her love for that particular corner of circus life was being cultivated simultaneously. “My mom and dad always had animals around — elephants, lions, tigers.” You know, the usual. And because her parents were also into high-flying stuff like aerial performing, “I had the best of both worlds.” Per the animal part of that world, four-legged critters were, well, everywhere. “When I was growing up, it wasn’t uncommon to have a baby lion wandering around the house,” she notes matter-of-factly. Some kids have housebroken cats and dogs sharing living space with them; Vicenta and her siblings had lions and tigers and more. Oh, my? Well, OK, baby lions and tigers. “They ate dog food out of a bowl,” she adds, just like a canine would. “They sat in our laps,” she continues, just like Puffy the puss might. “When they knew mom was leaving the house, they’d run out of the house behind,” she reveals, just like a pack o’ puppies should. “They took baths with us,” she reminisces. When mom dropped Vicenta off at school, guess what was looking out of the car window wistfully, as she ambled away with her books and school supplies in hand? Let’s just say it had stripes and issued forth with something slightly more assertive than “mee-oow.” Reared amid a literal menagerie And so it went for Vicenta during her youth, reared amid a literal menagerie, inside and outside the Pages house. Around the age of “7 or 8,” she recalls, “I asked dad if I could become part of the tiger act. He said, ‘when you’re older’ and I asked ‘how old?,’ and he said, ‘I don’t know, maybe 14 or 15.’” Sure enough, at 14, Vicenta popped the question again, right on cue. “I held him to it,” she notes. Vicenta: “Do you remember what you said?” Dad: “Yes, I remember, I remember.” At 14, she joined her father in the cage with the big cats. At 18, she entered the cage solo. By 20, after much courting by Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey, she left the Pages family circus — no mean show itself — for the frankly Greatest Show on Earth. For the record, the big cats routinely migrated from inside the Pages’ house to outside in a pen by around the 6-month marker, she notes. And with good reason: “That’s about the age they start to not realize their own strength. So they moved outside with the big guys.” The problem: “They have to learn they don’t live inside a house anymore and to realize that they’re not a dog, that they’re actually a tiger. No more lounging around the house and sleeping in a bed. They have to learn to interact with their own kind, and that can be hard to do.” Once they’ve grown to full adulthood and find themselves in a cage surrounded by hundreds of circus-goers, the trick for the trainer, Vicenta says, is to learn their personalities intimately and, more importantly, learn how to gauge those personalities — “what bothers them, what they like and don’t like.” Danger in a cage surrounded by six massive white tigers comes when the trainer fails to read the signals properly and take action before a distraction or threat from the environment causes them to react in defense. “Sometimes it’s very, very hard to read what they’re thinking,” Vicenta confesses. “Much different than with, say, horses and ponies. It’s always a risk, and you take one with every show. I’ve had nothing happen so far, God forbid and knock on wood.” Whatever, she wouldn’t have it any other way, either flying up in the air with the greatest of ease or holding her own down in terra firma while staring down a cage filled with teeth. “I get bored very easily,” says Vicenta. “I have a very short attention span. I need constant change. I’d go crazy if I had to sit at a desk and do one thing.” At a glanceWhat: Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus presents “Boom A Ring” When: 7 p.m. Thursday and Friday, 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Saturday Where: U.S. Cellular Coliseum, 101 S. Madison St., Bloomington Tickets: General, $15; VIP seats, $30; POD seats, $40 • Through today only, general seating tickets for "Boom A Ring" are being discounted from $15 to $10. The discount is good for all four remaining perform-ances. The offer does not apply to VIP seating and is not applicable to previously purchased tickets. Box office number: (866) 891-9992 Added event: “All-Access Pre-Show,” an hour before each performance, allowing audience to meet and greet performers and animals (free to all ticket-holders) White noiseTrivial tidbits from the rarefied word of white tigers: Scientific name: Panthera tigris Reason for the color: Genetic condition that eliminates the orange pigment, but leaves the black stripes Other distinction: They tend to be larger at birth than their orange brethren Famous owners: Vegas magician duo Siegfried & Roy, who’ve bred them and trained them for their performances for years Famous performances: As the (computer-generated) accomplices of the White Witch in the movie version of “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” Number in cage with Vicenta Pages this weekend: 6 (4 females, 2 males; ages 3-7) Their non-scientific names: Spirit, Fiona, Cia, Mikalya, Mohan, Taurus E-mail this story | Print this story | Search archives | RSS Show comments |  Hide comments | Hide comments on all stories |
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