All for Fun: Fleas and Banjos Get Festive
By Monte Mitchell
Winston-Salem Journal Reporter
If anybody at MerleFest has fleas, you would think it would be Jim Alberti.
Andrea Thomas, a chemistry instructor at Wilkes Community College, asks him a question that she probably wouldn't ask any other visitor to campus were it not for the circus-like atmosphere created by thousands of festivalgoers.
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Jim Alberti appears to hold a flea with tweezers as Ryan Michaels, 7, holds a silver ring for the flea to jump through. (Journal photo by Jennifer Rotenizer)
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"You have fleas?" she said.
"Not me, the circus," Alberti said.
Thomas said she thought a flea circus was just a myth, but dozens of children became believers after crowding around the Alberti Flea Circus in the Little Pickers area.
"Watch the derring, watch the doing, and see how it's done," Alberti made his pitch, and then shot a flea out of a cannon.
Although a big part of the 17th annual MerleFest takes place around main stages where stars strut their stuff, another big part of the fun is at the smaller venues where people can get close enough to rub elbows with performers - musicians and fleas.
It can seem as if every other person at the festival is holding a guitar, banjo, fiddle or mandolin, and that is part of the fun, too, walking the grounds to hear the clusters of amateurs pounding out bluegrass.
At the banjo contest, where Will Parsons fingerpicked "Riff Rafter" and "Ground Speed" to pluck first place from 19 other contestants, Grammy-winning banjo player Alison Brown chatted with admirers and signed autographs.
She was a judge for the banjo contest, which drew more than 100 spectators, a relatively cozy group compared to the thousands who watch the main stage. The Alison Brown Quartet will perform in the big-time today, from 1:25 until 2:10 p.m. on the Watson Stage and again from 5:05 until 5:50 p.m. on the Americana Stage.
Alberti's fleas are near enough the Watson Stage that his three shows today and three shows Sunday aren't prescheduled and tend to wait for a break in the music. His opening act yesterday, from the main stage, was the Moscow-to-Nashville group Bering Strait.
"Are you ready for some bluegrass?" banjo player Ilya Toshinsky asked the crowd. "I'm going to play a tune I learned growing up in the southern mountains of Russia."
The music was wasted on the fleas. Alberti explained to the children that fleas have tiny, tiny ears.
"If you want to get them to do something you have to shout," he says. His technique is quieter, though, holding a flea gently in tweezers and coaxing it to jump through a hoop held by audience volunteer Ryan Michaels, 7, from Dayton, Ohio.
Ryan would later say that he couldn't feel anything when the flea landed on his hand, but he searched when Alberti said that the flea had escaped. Alberti used his tweezers to check under Ryan's T-shirt collar as the boy squirmed. "He was looking, that's the magic of it," said Ryan's mother, Lisa Michaels.
Alberti, of Winston-Salem, has brought his fleas to 12 Merle-Fests now. He cranks a street organ, like monkey grinders of 100 years ago, to announce the start of his show.
The Alberti Flea Circus has been in the family since the 1870s or so, through a great-great uncle whose name is now forgotten. Alberti's grandfather Sam picked up the tweezers, and Jim Alberti helped from the time he was 9.
All that practice, and there was still an accident when Dardnell the flea climbed up on her high perch and leapt into a water-filled can.
"It just wasn't her best dive," Alberti said. "Usually she does an Olympic dive, but today she splashed the kids."
Still, even Captain Spaulding, the flea shot from the toy cannon, has a real fondness for the audience. "They love the crowd," Alberti said. "They have a taste for children. Captain Spaulding says children are great food for thought."
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