The Ballad of Pie Car Chili

In 2010 the New York Times did a puff piece on the Ringling Blue Unit Pie Car. Truth to tell, from Glenn Collins’ description I thought he must be writing about some other pie car on some other circus on some other planet. The whole place sounded too tasteful and dignified. Not what I remembered at all.

But then, what I remember more than anything else from a half century before is the dreaded pie car chili. It is a subject that I find hard to put into mundane prose, so I’ve attempted instead to put it down in verse. Forgive me, Ogden Nash!

Oh, the circus train is mighty long and it holds both man and beast.

And when the men get hongry, there’s the pie car for a feast.

But stay away from the chili, son, oh stay away I beg;

For it turns the stomach into flame enough to boil an egg!

The recipe’s been handed down from Fu Manchu, I trow.

It’s got a lot of kidney beans and quite a bit of crow.

There’s rubber tires, thumb tacks, and a touch of powdered ghoul;

NASA wants to test it for their next flight’s rocket fuel.

Chock full of spices volatile, so volatile indeed

That it would make Beelzebub start up to cough and bleed.

Some gravel and a pinch of lard, along with molten tar

Is what they serve as ‘chili’ on that wretched old pie car.

And when the clowns are broke and have a hangover as well

They like to slurp and gobble up that brew that’s made in hell.

Then their stomachs rumble and feel heavy like feldspar --

And that is when they have to cram into the damn clown car!

The Black Hole of Calcutta never was as foul a sink

As the wretched clown car when those fellows start to stink.

The fumes are like a mastodon or any herd of swine;

There is no cure besides a dose of hundred-proof strychnine.

It’s evil work is never done, for when you think it’s gone

You find you still are belching it full many a mournful dawn.

So spurn that awful chili that the pie car thrusts at you

And order up instead a tender charbroiled potoroo!