The members of Subterranean Cirqus — Leroy Lewis, Andy Pyburn, Joel Ruiz, Sassy Frass, back row, left to right; Meghan Von Zur Muehlen, Pinky Pell, Lazarus Z. Hellgate, front row, left to right; and John Michael Bond, seated — posed for a “family photo” in the Times Free Press studio.Chattanooga Times Free Press entertainment features reporter Casey Phillips spoke with Lazarus Z. Hellgate and Pinkie Pell, founders of local performance troupe Subterranean Cirqus, about why they’re able to withstand so much pain, the history of sideshow and the stomach-churning act Lazarus considers the low point of his career.
CP: Walk me through when and how the Cirqus got started. It was originally Scenic City Sideshow, right?
LZH: When we originally started, we were called Sadistic Scenic City Sideshow. It was just Pinkie, myself and one of our friends. We started out just doing videos on the Internet. This was before YouTube blew up, mind you. Break.com would pay us money to do these crazy videos. Somewhere along the way, YouTube got started and everyone started putting up videos because they wanted to be on the Internet, not because someone was paying them. They flooded the market, so we decided to stop doing it and stop selling our videos to major conglomerates and put together a full stage show.
What we do on stage and what we were doing in those videos are absolutely two ends of the spectrum. At that point, we put together a small stage show and had some bands contact us wanting us to do something on stage with them. We did that for a little while and realized that bands drama was a little bit more than we could deal with. At that point, we found another guy who was our first talker, emcee, The Doctor. He’s not with us anymore. He was our emcee the longest.
We had fun as Scenic City for four years. We did some touring. When he and I split ways, I wanted to take the show in the direction I wanted to to begin with, which was a full circus sideshow with a burlesque show and a strongman and comedians – any kind of variety act we could get our hands on, anything strange and unusual. He just wanted to do the pain acts. Let’s be honest, it’s always been mine and her show, so we had to put our foot down somewhere.