Mr. Burgess was preparing for two afternoon sessions in the circus room, a spacious studio on the fifth floor of the school, on Broadway in Greenwich Village.
"The Blue Room became the White Room, became the Circus Room -- many colors on the walls," said Jessica Geula, the chief operating officer at Exit.
Rosie, whose last name may have been Italian, was a waitress at a downtown Long Beach bar called The Circus Room.
Ali entered the Circus Maximus room at Caesar's Palace hotel bellowing slogans and threats and faking attempts to punch Bugner, who grinned widely and occasionally waved a fist back.
Blogger culture is partly to blame: it's less Suzie Bubble and a Nikon DSLR (how cute), more IG stories from a branded breakfast off Oxford Circus and dressing room selfies with a pop-feminist caption.
We need all the craziness, and some of it no doubt will be harmful," he told VICE, describing the psychedelic movement as one big circus with enough room for doctors, researchers, academics, and the people who just want to get high and trip out for a couple of hours.
And with the new, 60-room Circus Hotel (Rosenthaler Strasse 1; 49-30-2000-3939; www.circus-berlin.de; doubles from 78 euros) just two blocks away, this pocket of Berlin has, seemingly overnight, become a new hotel district.
At the Hotel Domus Aventina, a lovely, quiet place near the Circus Maximus, with rooms that open out onto the courtyard of an ancient monastery, a concierge, Damiano Melone, said Americans aren't the only ones canceling: "Everyone is afraid of traveling right now".
But China is a sprawling circus of activity with room to roam and prod and question.
The new House of Yes, which they financed by throwing fund-raisers and built with the help of friends, is a sparkling event space with a three-story "sky room" and circus truss — you, too, can learn trapeze, at their weekly classes — and an enticing second-floor Make Fun Studio, filled with sewing machines, fabric, props and costumes that Ms. Burke rents out.
But out among the people or facing a news media circus in the Blue Room at City Hall, he was a feisty, slippery egoist who could not be pinned down by questioners and who could outtalk anybody in the authentic voice of New York: as opinionated as a Flatbush cabby, as loud as the scrums on 42nd Street, as pugnacious as a West Side reform Democrat mother.
