Years ago, during talk show television’s Golden Age, I sat down with my father to watch his appearance that week on the Jerry Springer Show. Invariably in these programs, the circus surrounding the subject matter–e.g. miracle cures, mass hysteria, people who can’t throw away newspapers–is summoned to earth by a dour expert, like a doctor, a lawyer, a life coach, who shows up at the end and ruins all the fun. In this episode, devoted to men who have secret second families, my dad–a pubic affairs consultant–was the expert.

He looked good in his gray pinstripe suit, his new haircut. But he looked stiff, following the “don’t move your hands” rule of early broadcasting. He crossed his legs, folded his arms and did his best to explain why it wasn’t a good idea to have a second family; that it was in fact illegal, immoral and quite hard to pull off. The host asked how one could control those second-family urges, to which he replied, “a healthy diet, good spousal communication and simple self-control.” Applause.

Meanwhile, sitting next to him was a large, fidgety woman with a purse held tight in her lap. She had spent most of her allotted time screaming at a frail little man to her right. Now, in the closing minutes of the show, while my father calmed the proceedings with his long-viewed perspective, the woman smoldered in her chair.

“She an actress,” he said, pointing at the television. Which, for some reason, at the time, really surprised me. My mind started to wander, searching deep into my past and questioning everything I’d ever seen on television, including ZOOM.

“Now check this out,” he said, as the smoldering woman attacked my old man with her purse and had to be retrained by Rosey Grier, who happened to be sitting in the front row.

Is any of this true? Yes. Some. But my overall point is best explained by an accident that recently occurred with my Netflix account. Bear with me.

I am not by any means a culture snob, but last week I was expecting to receive the DVD of the Berlin Philharmonic’s New Year’s 2001 performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten, Op. 15 featuring Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. Instead I received The Jersey Shore: Season One, an MTV reality show in which eight Italian Americans are summoned to a rental house in Seaside Heights, New Jersey to make blender drinks, blow-dry their hair, work out and display their horrendous dancing skills at local night clubs that serve blue drinks in white plastic cups. It is, truly and sincerely, a work of art.

Much has already been said of Vinny, Ronnie, Pauly D, JWoww, Snooki, “The Situation,” Sammi and personal-favorite Angelina “Jolie” Pivarnick. So, I won’t contribute. What I will say is, The Jersey Shore is scripted. It has to be. The Israeli stalker? Ronnie’s mom? JWoww attacking “The Situation” in Atlantic City? As Dennis Miller once said of Ronald Reagan’s performance in his Presidential debates with Walter Mondale, “the last time I saw choreography that stiff was at the Lee Harvey Oswald prison transfer.”

So, reality shows are scripted. So what? We know this already. The American television audience is jaded and desensitized enough to know that everything–even your average Cinnamon Toast Crunch commercial–is a flat-out lie. Nevertheless, most of us are sitting back and allowing it to happen. Why? Because we want it so.

Are we as a culture so obsessed with other people’s stories, misfortunes and triumphs to avoid having to reflect on our own? Maybe. In this case, any enjoyment of non-fiction, memoir, reality television or YouTube confessional is actually an escape into the other, into that which is not true to us, detached from us, easily picked up and put down. In spite of the recent market dominance of non-fiction (e.g. memoirs, social networking and reality television), it is in fact fiction (i.e. novels, short stories, epic poems) that is the unbreakable foundation of entertainment.

When I was nine years old visiting my grandmother in Buffalo, she took me to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The main attraction that year was called the “Flaming Globe of Death,” or something like that–an act featuring a man riding a motorcycle around and around inside a round metal cage suspended a hundred feet in the air and covered with flames.

Unfortunately, an accident occurred the afternoon we saw it. The door to the cage opened and the motorcycle rider fell out and just barely grabbed hold of the swinging door, holding on for dear life while his bike, somehow, kept circling the cage. Not a single person in the audience remained seated or made a sound. The big-top lights went up and the announcer called for a net, but the motorcycle rider waved them all away, painstakingly crawled back into the cage, pulled the hatch shut behind him and narrowly avoided getting plowed by his own motorcycle as he hopped back on and whizzed around to raucous applause and relief.

Needless to say, I was moved. In the days following, the Flaming Wheel of Death preoccupied my every moment. I wondered, if the falling rider had not caught the cage door, would he really have fallen to his death? Would they have canceled the whole circus? Would I still have been allowed to get that spinning rainbow flashlight souvenir on the way out?

A few weeks after I returned home to Little Rock, my other grandmother got tickets  for the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus when it came to town later that month. I felt like I’d won the lottery.

Prior to the show, without revealing too much about the act itself, I warned my grandmother of the Flaming Globe of Death act, but I didn’t dare mention the near-fatal accident out of fear that it might, God forbid, happen again. Waiting for the show to start, while everyone watched the clowns and donkeys and baton twirlers warm up the crowd, I was watching that round metal cage, nestled high up in the rafters, tucked behind the nets and ropes and ladders like a slowly forming wasp’s nest. The lights went down, the spinning rainbow flashlights swirled, and the show began.

Afterward, driving home, my grandmother probably looked over at me and wondered what was wrong. I had been so excited to see this circus, even for the second time in a month, and then something about my mood switched near the end of the show, during the Flaming Globe of Death, when the poor motorcycle rider fell out of the flaming globular cage while his bike kept looping, and they almost had to stop the show.

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B. Brandon Barker is an online media strategist with clients that include U.S. News & World Report, Time-Warner, Food Network, The Nielsen Company, Revolution Health, Entergy, Amplify Public Affairs and Dogster. His short stories have appeared in Global City Review, The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror (St. Martin’s Press), Verbicide, and online at McSweeney’s. His first novel, OPERATION EMU, was the subject of a feature story in The Baltimore Sun. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, he now lives in rural Virginia.

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