Kids, don't try this at home. Come to think of it, don't try it anywhere else
 either.

But if you insist on swallowing swords, placing flames in your mouth or hammering a
 nail into your nostril, the freaks from Coney Island would love to enroll you in
 their new "Sideshow School," a six-session tutorial on how to perform all the acts
 at Coney Island Sideshow without slicing open your throat, searing your tongue or
 deviating your septum.

Think of it as a baseball fantasy camp for people who always wanted to run away and
 join the circus. 

"But this is better," said glass-eating legend Todd Robbins, the school's dean. "If
 you actually ran away to the circus, you'd be what the circus people call a 'First
 of May' and spend a year just taking tickets before they'd teach you anything. But
 with us, you don't even have to clean out the elephant pen."

Robbins didn't waste any time taking his students out of the frying pan and into
 fire-eating. Lesson one: Remember Bill Clinton.

"The most-important rule is do not inhale the flame," Robbins said. "Inhaling is
 very bad."

With that, Robbins handed out a box of matches and told his students to light one,
 put it in their mouths and close their lips around it.

"That's kinda counter-intuitive," said Robyn Thompson, a professional clown who
 hopes to use the sideshow class to expand beyond kid's birthday parties. With a
 little coaching, Robbins got Thompson through lesson one. Emboldened, she decided
 to try a torch -- until she saw the resulting fireball. Fire-eating would have to
 wait.

But even Thompson had no problem transferring flames from one torch to another with
 her fingers, palms and tongue. The trick? There is no trick -- except, as G. Gordon
 Liddy used to say, the trick is not to mind.

Next, Robbins lectured on a stunt called "The Human Blockhead." Eventually, Robbins
 will get his class to insert four-inch-long nails into their nostrils, but for now,
 a Q-Tip covered in anti-bacterial cream sufficed (don't tell Chesebrough Ponds).

Alan Elsner, a bookish 40-year-old, quickly graduated to nails. "You know, once you
 get the hang of it, it's an easy stunt," he said, with the head of a nail sticking
 out of his nostril. "But it's the coolest."

Having a sword sticking out of your mouth is cool, too, but it's not so easy.
 Robbins handed out wire hangers that had been flattened into the basic shape of a
 sword and told his class that the "trick" to swallowing it is merely overcoming
 10,000 years of human evolution called the gag reflex. Everyone in the class
 failed, but Robbins promised that if they stick the hanger down their throats seven
 times a day for a week, one day, the throat will just open up.

"And when it does, it'll scare the living daylights out of you," he said. "But
 you'll know how to swallow a sword."

The day's lessons completed, Robbins gave his students their homework -- "DO try
 this at home" -- and sent them on their way. Dick Zigun, who runs the sideshow, was
 impressed -- to a point.

"Sure, we're training the sideshow stars of tomorrow, but what I really need is a
 midget," Zigun said, complaining that Koko the Killer Klown, the sideshow's popular
 dwarf, has gone AWOL.

"I wish Todd could teach them how to be a dwarf," Zigun said. "But I guess it's one
 of those things that you either got it, or you don't."

--30--

gersh.kuntzman@verizon.net