Half an elephant and not-so-smart mice

The kids brought home handbills; posters were pasted on walls; and on Saturday, a small car with a large loudspeaker on its roof made a tour of the village, fuzzily blaring the news: a parc de loisirs was coming to town. Quincy and I studied a flyer carefully. Among the various spectacles and amusements, we figured the kids would be especially excited about the objets gonflables – a phrase that we assumed, correctly, to be a French way of talking about "bouncy castles." As for me, I was intrigued by the promise of Sourisland – a "village miniature de souris savants!" Because, you know, if there's one thing more entertainingly surreal than a miniature village, it's a miniature village populated by preternaturally smart mice.

The parc de loisirs was set up in a dusty parking lot next to the gasoline station. There was a small circus tent and four large inflatables, each as big as a house. Despite all the pre-parc publicity, there weren't a lot of people there. Which is not surprising, given that Cotignac is a sleepy little town. Also, a lot of families probably preferred to spend their sunny Sunday afternoon on amusements that didn't cost 8 euros per child (but only 5 euros for grown-ups!). Quincy and I got our money's worth by relaxing in the weeds at the edge of the lot, leaning against a makeshift fence, and watching the action on the inflatables. Which was mostly stuff like this: Jasper slides to the bottom of a giant inflatable sinking ship. Maddox too. Jasper takes off running, in shoeless stocking feet, across the dusty gravel in the direction of a giant inflatable chicken. Maddox, also in his socks, stumbles across the gravel after her.

The gonflables scene went on until a loudspeaker called everyone into the tent, where a series of entertainments began to unfold. As they unfolded, it became abundantly clear that the whole thing was very much a mom-and-pop-and-their-collection-of-kids operation (the dad and the kids provided the entertainment, while mom sold popcorn and cotton candy from a cart outside) which made me enjoy it all the more.

It started with the trained goat. It appears that this is de rigeur among carnies in the south of France: A scrawny goat with gigantic distended teats balancing upon an increasingly tall stack of increasingly tiny stools. Then there was the teenage daughter of the troupe, dressed for burlesque, walking on a wire and twirling a dozen hula-hoops. At one point, Jasper leaned back and whispered, "She would be more beautiful if she didn't have braces." I reflected on my own metal-mouthed high-school years of braces and retainers and headgear. "Hey kid, don't be so judgmental," I wanted to warn Jasper, "That's you in about 5 years, minus (I hope) the sequined bikini."

After she was done, the patriarch (and head clown) invited the audience into the ring so that we could try our own amateurish luck at hula-hooping. We were all comically bad at it. And some of us were comically badder than others. I'm told that I attracted an especially loud set of laughs when, after failing to spin the hoop around my waist, I tried to spin it around my neck by jerkily jackhammering my head back and forth like some sort of spastic woodpecker.

There was one little boy, though, maybe about Maddox's age, who was amazingly adept, and kept his hoop spinning perfectly with a confident rapid rhythm that reminded me of a masturbating monkey I once saw at a zoo. After we all gave him a big round of applause, it was revealed that he was a ringer: He was the youngest of the circus siblings, and this was his dad's amusing way of introducing him. A few minutes later, though, the boy wasn't feeling so great. While his two older brothers – dressed like identical homeless mimes – showed off some elaborate balancing skills on piles of barrels and planks, the 4-year-old nearly collapsed in tears while trying unsuccessfully to set up his own apparatus on the uneven ground. This led to some vivid acting-out in the direction of his dad who was trying simultaneously to energetically emcee the show and to keep the whole thing from becoming a train-wreck of predictable family dynamics, and who was doing it all while wearing a ludicrous orange shag-carpet wig.

Things soon got back on track with another crowd-pleasing piece of audience participation, in which Jasper played a prominent role. This particular act involved a dancing elephant. Except that it wasn't a real dancing elephant. It was two people bending over with an elephant-shaped sheet fitted over them, blindly following a bewigged clown's Svengali-like instructions to kneel down and to stand up, to trot and to boogie and, inevitably, to fall over sideways in a hysterical heap. Jasper was half of that elephant. Specifically: the back half.

I found it all entirely cheesy and delightful and worth every centime, but I did wonder if we were ever going to see that miniature village of super-smart mice. After all that audience participation, I was starting to half-seriously think that there weren't any precocious rodents after all, that "souris savants" wasn't to be taken literally, that maybe it was just some ironic euphemism meaning, loosely, "easily-gulled country folk who pay good money to become spastic woodpeckers and elephants' asses in front of their friends and neighbors."

But I was wrong. Sourisland did indeed exist, and it was finally unveiled after a second sweaty round of bouncy castle fun. Yep, it was a miniature village all right, with a school and a church and post office and all. But the mice inside it didn't seem so savants. Aside from climbing a tiny ladder and sliding down a tiny slide, they didn't show off any special skills. They mostly just stuck their heads in and out of the tiny windows of the tiny buildings, and pooped their tiny turds all over the tiny streets. Big deal; I could do that myself.