Sideshow in the context of "Fiji mermaid"

Circus skills are a group of disciplines that have been performed as entertainment in circus, carnival, sideshow, busking, variety, vaudeville, or music hall shows. Most circus skills are still being performed today. Many are also practiced by non-performers as a hobby.

Circus schools and instructors use various systems of categorization to group circus skills by type. Systems that have attempted to formally organize circus skills into pragmatic teaching groupings include the Gurevich system (the basis of the Russian Circus School's curriculum) and the Hovey Burgess system.

Fire eating (a.k.a. pyrophagia) is the act of putting a flaming object into the mouth and extinguishing it. A fire eater can be an entertainer, a street performer, part of a sideshow or a circus act but has also been part of spiritual tradition in India.

A freak show is an exhibition of biological rarities, referred to in popular culture as "freaks of nature". Typical features would be physically unusual humans, such as those uncommonly large or small, those with extraordinary diseases and conditions, and others with performances expected to be shocking to viewers. Heavily tattooed or pierced people have sometimes been seen in freak shows (more common in modern times as a sideshow act), as have attention-getting physical performers such as fire-eating and sword-swallowing acts.

A human blockhead is a carnival or sideshow performer who hammers a nail or other implement (such as an ice pick, awl or screwdriver) into their nasal cavity via the nostril.

A flea circus is a circus sideshow attraction in which fleas are attached (or appear to be attached) to miniature carts and other items, and encouraged to perform circus acts within a small housing.

The Midway Plaisance, known locally as the Midway, is a public park on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. It is one mile long by 220 yards wide and extends along 59th and 60th streets, joining Washington Park at its west end and Jackson Park at its east end. It divides the Hyde Park community area to the north from the Woodlawn community area to the south. Near Lake Michigan, the Midway is about 6 miles (10 km) south of the downtown "Loop". The University of Chicago had been established just north of the park, and university buildings now front the Midway to the south, as well.

Intended as part of the Chicago boulevard system, the park came to prominence when the Midway was laid out to host popular amusements at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, which hosted the world's first Ferris Wheel, later lending its name, "midway", to areas at county and state fairs and amusement parks with sideshows. The park is also featured as one of the main settings in the book The Devil in the White City written by Erik Larson. Landscaped with long vistas and avenues of trees at the start of the 20th century, the Midway in part followed the vision of its designer Frederick Law Olmsted, one of the creators of New York City's Central Park, but without his proposed feature of a Venetian canal down the Midway's center linking the lagoon systems of Jackson and Washington parks. Instead, the Midway is landscaped with a fosse, lawn covered depression, where the canal would have been, although in the winter parts of the grounds are turned over for ice skating. The Midway Plaisance has a variety of different elements for visitors to explore, including lakes, trails, bridges, and fields. Today, the park hosts many different programs, including: concerts, ice skating lessons, movie nights, and many other events.