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For Gorman, this move was pure cotton candy, a mere 20 miles between gigs. : Some Pre-Dawn Dreams Go Lumbering Down the Freeway

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The elephants didn’t follow the yellow brick road to Northridge.

They followed the little blue arrows.

While most of Northridge slept this morning, Circus Vargas came to town. Earlier this week, its multicolored big top had been set up in Agoura. As soon as the performers finished their acts last night, they packed up their props and pachyderms and set out for the Devonshire Fairgrounds on the North Campus of Cal State Northridge.

The circus’s $250,000 main tent, which takes eight hours to put up, was pulled down (a job that can be done in 20 minutes in an emergency), and it, too, hit the road.

The nine elephants were due to arrive in Northridge at 3 o’clock this morning.

“We use little arrows that you’ll see all along your freeways to route them in,” says Michael Gorman, in charge of logistics for the 16-year-old show, which is sometimes credited with putting the big top back in the circus (Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey folded its tents and moved its greatest show on earth indoors in 1956).

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For Gorman, this move was pure cotton candy, a mere 20 miles between gigs, instead of the mettle-testing thousand-mile treks the show sometimes makes.

The designated route (east on the Ventura Freeway, north on Reseda, east on Devonshire) was marked with blue paper arrows along the side of the road. Such specificity was not strictly necessary in this case, since the circus is Valley-based, with offices in North Hollywood.

But as Gorman points out, marking the route is a time-honored tradition. In the grand old days of circus-wagon caravans, wistful little boys in knickers knew that all they had to do to join the circus was to follow the yellow sulfur trail that led from their own dull town to the fascinating one the circus was visiting next.

Today’s trail markers are practical as well. If the blue arrow points downward, for instance, the driver of the van knows to slow down: steep hill and potential elephant pileup ahead.

Mike Gorman is Circus Vargas’s “24-hour man.” A former ringmaster, he now performs an even more important function, albeit one that requires less spiffy clothes, for the troupe of 350. Gorman comes to each new town 24 hours before his colleagues to make sure the circus is set up without a hitch. (He also spends two or three months a year recruiting and training Brooke Shields and other celebrities to hang from the rafters for CBS’s Circus of the Stars.)

On Thursday, for example, Gorman had a white “blueprint” of the circus layout he wanted spray-painted on the Northridge fairgrounds. That way there can be no uncertainty as to where the roustabouts, or working men, as they prefer to be called in the new circus, should erect the main tent--at 360 feet by more than 200 feet, believed to be the largest in the world.

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Gorman also indicated the desired placement of the circus’s humbler temporary structures, including the hooch, as the men’s sleeping van is traditionally known, and the donniker, as the men’s 18-stall toilet truck is called.

In essence, Gorman’s job is to make sure the wonder runs on time. There will be no oooooohs tonight in Northridge, no aaaaaahs, if the daring young man’s flying trapeze has been left behind in Agoura. So Gorman has a checklist. What’s on it? “One tent, four center poles, 56 quarter poles . . . “ he answers playfully. Plus more than 150 camels, llamas and other animals, including 18 tigers.

Like the elephants, the big cats rode through local streets this morning just about the time local bartenders announced last call. “Can you imagine the horror--or delight--of someone discovering a truck full of tigers next to them at a stoplight?” Gorman asks.

On rare occasions, usually in the Midwest, fierce winds have caused the troupe to fold up its tent before the end of the performance. But the only major logistical error Gorman has made in 15 years with Circus Vargas was misplacing an elephant.

As he explains, one of his tasks is to visit truck stops around the nation, alerting their management that the circus will be pulling in someday and will need to water and exercise its animals. “You don’t take a tiger out and walk him,” Gorman says of these unusual rest stops. “But you do take an elephant out and walk him. Otherwise their legs get crampy.”

Several years ago, during a stop in the Lake Okeechobee area, near Miami, an elephant named Big Joe wandered off. Gorman and others searched for two weeks before Joe, unharmed, was finally spotted in the swampy wilderness with the help of a helicopter.

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Gorman, who is in his 30s, got his first job with Ringling Brothers while he was still in high school in San Pedro. Like a growing number of his big top colleagues, Gorman has a college degree (the ringmaster is a former teacher, he notes, and there is a Ph.D. or two among members of the promotion staff). Once dominated by European talent, today’s circus is attracting more and more Americans, he says, often college-educated young people who don’t want to work 9 to 5.

Gorman never longed to subdue lions or have Jumbo step on his head, although he has performed those acts from time to time. Since he first read “Toby Tyler,” he has been fascinated by the business side of the circus business.

When he saw “The Greatest Show on Earth” as a child, he recalls, it wasn’t the trapeze artist he identified with.

“I imagined myself as Charlton Heston,” says Gorman, who will be in Simi Valley on Monday, 24 hours before the clowns and elephants arrive. “Heston was in charge of the circus. I never wanted to be a performer like Cornel Wilde. I wanted to run the show.”

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