Not necessarily one person, but sideshow freaks in general.
It’s not something you see anymore nowadays, but in the 19th century and the early 20th century, you saw them often. In the 1932 horror flick Freaks, many of them star — and they’re the real deal, too. One of the “freaks” prominently featured in the film went by Schlitzie. He was an adult man with the mind of a child, suffering from microcephaly, an abnormally small head and an underdeveloped brain.
Abandoned at birth, no one had any idea what to do with the handicapped child with his funny-looking head and the mental age of a perpetual three-year-old. So Schlitzie was sold to the carnival circuit, where his new owner decided it’d be funnier if the kid, likely named Simon, was renamed “Schlitzie” and put in a dress and called a girl. And had his head shaven and only a tiny ponytail on the back of his skull remaining. Because a funny looking girl is funnier than a boy, apparently.
There was an army of these poor unfortunate souls out there, Schlitzie was one of many. Children born so clearly deformed and “not right” that the parents, many of whom dirt-poor themselves, would take one single look at the infant and immediately discard it… they would then end up in the sideshow circuit, travel on the road with a circus and be shown to gawking audiences for money. Schlitzie reportedly became very depressed when his “owner” died and, at the age of sixty, he suddenly found himself confined to a retirement home after the owner’s daughter, who “inherited” him, didn’t want to keep “that weird little monkey creature” her father always toured with.
Making matters worse, these people were often used for purposes of promoting eugenics, as sinister folks would use them to promote their agendas. And even their personal lives were decided entirely by management — the fat woman was made to marry the skeleton-like man, the two midgets were married to one another… their whole lives, from cradle to coffin, were dictated, planned-out and sold for money by the P.T. Barnum’s of the world. No dignity, no love. Just mockery, endless jokes at their expense as people jeered, stared and shouted and newspapermen dubbed them “the missing link”… Schlitzie, above, died in 1971 at age 70.
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