...conclusion of our Branson vacation.
What better way to spend Sunday afternoon than by taking your kids to the circus? If you've been to Branson, you know there are a multitude of different shows you can go to. However, the majority of them would not work well with little children. But, the circus was the perfect show for us!
We decided to go to the Yakov Smirnoff Moscow Circus. Here are Dan and the kids with the giant Yakov head. It had moving eyes and jaw and Joseph wasn't quite sure about that.
Inside we picked up our tickets and a little while before the show was to start, some of the circus performers came out to do fun things with all the children. In this picture, Anne is getting her face painted by one of the pretty ladies.
In fact, all four of them got their faces painted. We also saw the tall man on stilts, and the dog trainer with some of her poodles.
We found our seats and eagerly waited for the show to start. 
This was not a big three-ring circus with hundreds of performers and lions, tigers, and elephants. It was much smaller and took place on a stage. It told the story of Marina the Ballerina and Andre the Clown, how they met and fell in love, and how Marina's evil sister, the Ringmaster, plotted to break them apart, and then how they found each other again. Through all of the storytelling, there was juggling, ballet dancing, superb unicycling, a magnificent bubbles routine, poodles dressed up as lions and doing tricks, a woman playing with fire, Russian dancing (you know, when they squat down and kick their legs out, and it makes your knees hurt just to watch), the ballerina gracefully doing tricks way up high on a ring, and many other acts. Then at the end, the ballerina and the clown (now dressed in ballet clothes) did a beautiful routine dancing and floating on ribbons hanging from the ceiling. The kids loved it all(so did we!). Joseph didn't even fall asleep like I thought he would.
We couldn't take pictures during the show, but we ended up getting a DVD of the performance and a storybook telling the story of the clown and the ballerina. The kids love to watch the circus over and over again.
A nice lady took a picture of our family in front of the stage after the show.
After the circus, we stopped to eat dinner at Culver's Frozen Custard and Butterburgers. Yum! After a short while, Dan said don't look now (and I restrained myself), but the two main characters from the circus are sitting two tables behind you. The kids didn't recognize them out of costume, which was good, but I am sure if they looked at us, they knew we had been to their circus, seeing that our children still had bright red spots on their faces. I wanted to say to them, "You might perform in a circus, but we live in one!" Don't worry though, we let them eat in peace. :)
