The artwork of Marie Roberts continues to pop up in some pretty high-profile places. From being the focus of pastry decorations on TLC’s “Cake Boss” to serving as the backdrop on the latest album cover of The Little Willies, Roberts’ art appears to have the same eye-catching appeal as the sideshow spectacles she depicts.

Roberts, who is a painter and art professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University’s Metropolitan Campus in Teaneck, isn’t that far removed from lively carnival performers, such as Lionel the Lion-Faced Man and Baron Paucci, the World’s Smallest Perfect Man. These and many other freaks – as they’re affectionately referred to by Roberts – were friends of her Uncle Lester and her father Kenneth.

Uncle Lester was the outside talker for the Dreamland Circus Sideshow on Coney Island, and he was a “snake-oil” salesman who peddled his Bitter Wonder restorative powder. Kenneth was a cab driver who also served as a chauffeur for one of the sideshow actors named Zip, The What Is It.

“My father wouldn’t talk about his job because it was no big deal to him,” Roberts said. “Lester was a really enterprising guy as the outside talker. You look at the banner line, which has to get you to stop, and then you have someone with a voice (the outside talker) that makes you stop and come in. With Lester’s snake oil, called Bitter Wonder, he claimed it could do everything: remove pimples and wrinkles and grow hair on eggs. I think it was a laxative or a diuretic, and it had all health-food stuff in it.”

COVER ART

“For the Good Times” was released on Jan. 13. It’s the sophomore album of the rock-jazz-country group The Little Willies, which features multi-Grammy award winning singer Norah Jones, Lee Alexander, Jim Campilongo, Richard Julian and Dan Rieser.

On the album’s cover, Jones is lying horizontally across the laps of her seated band mates, and in the background appears a sideshow banner by Roberts. That banner, which features a variety of circus performers in action, hangs behind the stage area inside the Coney Island Circus Sideshow building on Surf Avenue in Brooklyn.

Prior to having her art appear on a music-album cover, Roberts’ work also was featured in a November 2009 episode of “Cake Boss” titled “Freaks, Fast Food & Frightened Frankie,” in which baker Buddy Valastro of Carlo’s Bakery in Hoboken created a cake to mark the 25^th anniversary of the Coney Island Circus Sideshow. Roberts’ canvas banners can be seen as decorative art on the brightly colored, layered cake.

According to the episode, the banner art was printed on edible paper with food coloring used instead of ink. The paper was then stuck to fondant before being cut out and applied to the sides of the cake.

A BANNER YEAR

Roberts is a graduate of Brooklyn College and has a M.F.A. from Queens College, C.U.N.Y. She’s been with FDU since 1986 and works on painting projects with students on and off campus. She’s also the Artist in Residence for Coney Island USA, which is a nonprofit arts organization that runs the Coney Island Circus Sideshow.

The Sideshow features continuous live acts, and tickets cost $10 ($5 for children 12 and younger). The nonprofit also operates the Coney Island Museum and develops programs, such as the Sideshow School, which allows visitors to learn sideshow tricks over the course of four days in the spring, summer and fall.  

Roberts first became involved with Coney Island USA in the early 1990s when she contacted Artistic Director Dick Zigun and got permission to draw the performers. Roberts showed Zigun some of her Uncle Lester’s sideshow photographs to which Zigun replied: “It’s nice to know that Lionel the Lion-Faced Man could go put on a party hat and have fun like everybody else.”

Around 1996-97, Roberts said the Sideshow moved to its current location on Surf Avenue.

“The sideshow needed banners … and I needed a project for my FDU students,” Roberts said. “We painted 27 banners that first year for 1997.”

Some banners stayed up longer than others, while others changed when different performers came onboard at the Sideshow. Some of the banners that have been taken down are part of collections in museums, including the Coney Island Museum. Roberts continues to create canvas banners for the building and involve her students in the process.

“After the students and I did that first project, I fell in love with painting these banners because I felt like I was using all of my training,” Roberts said. “And I felt really comfortable using the family history that I kind of ran away from as a kid. But after working all those years and connecting with Dick Zigun and the Coney Island Circus Sideshow, it’s like both halves of my life are understood.”

A CARNY LIFE FULL CIRCLE

Roberts explained that there are different kinds of acts in the side show. There are the working acts where somebody might pound nails into his nose; and then there are the self-made freaks, like the tattooed people; and then the born freaks like Uncle Lester’s friend, Lionel, who looked like a lion.

“The sideshow is about ability, and it was always about ability” Roberts said. “There are a lot of reasons why people exhibit themselves. Lionel was in Germany studying to be a dentist, and according to my Uncle Lester, Lionel said he looked like a lion and nobody was going to come to a dentist that looked like a lion. He spoke five languages and loved classical music, but he made more money being in a sideshow.

“Prince Randian, who was a living torso and someone my father knew, he lived in New Jersey and had eight kids,” Roberts continued. “He had a normal life when he wasn’t a freak. Freaks think about walking their dogs and going home to dinner. They’re just like everybody else; it’s just a job.”

Roberts said the sideshow performers refer to themselves as freaks and don’t shy away from being called that word by others.

“This sideshow did a lot to launder that word,” Roberts said. “I think that a lot of outsiders see the word freak with negative connotations. It’s sort of a badge of pride. Sometimes I think we’re all freaks but we just kind of hide it on the inside, and the scary, freaky people aren’t the ones who are performing. It’s the ones who are outside killing other people.”

Roberts said she grew up speaking “carny language,” which she said involves adding a lot of “itses” and “eeses” as a way to speak code in case someone suspicious or troublesome was lurking around.

“My students, if they know Snoop Dogg, they can understand what I’m saying,” she said. “My mother and I wound up using it at flea markets. My ex-husband and I talk it all the time.”

About 20 years ago, Roberts moved back into her childhood home in Brooklyn where many memories exist and the bodies of a sideshow monkey and snake are buried in the back yard.   

Roberts said she didn’t meet a lot of sideshow performers as a child because most were dead before she was born.

“I didn’t know the performers, but I knew the stories and saw the pictures,” she said.

Because she spends a lot of time these days interacting with sideshow performers, Roberts said she feels like she’s with family, even though her mom, dad and Uncle Lester have passed on. 

When asked if she was satisfied as to where her life has taken her so far, Roberts said she’s happy that’s she’s almost 58 and still painting.

“I’m amazed that people stop in the street to look at what I do and take photos,” she said. “It’s so hard in this society to be still doing at my age what you set out to do.”