Ellian: Our parents came from two different circus families in England and they were Irish too. Our mother’s family actually went back farther than our dad’s generationally in the business. But it was pretty cool because they both had shows and they ended up together and had eight children. All the kids were the performers in the shows too, and also played the music in the band, all multi talented. Our mother, Betty Kays, was an amazing woman. She had been in the riding act, vaulting with her brothers and she did a lot of things prior to getting with my father. And when they married, she put together a hilarious dog act with like 20 dogs. She worked that for years and years and years. And our father was an all around performer. He’d also been an aerialist, an acrobat, an animal trainer–he did it all.

Kay: He performed on the rings. That’s actually how our dad ended up being totally animal because he was doing rings. He had a dislocation, and broke his back. And he was in the hospital for two years because back then, it was fatal when you broke your back. They said he would never walk again and within no time at all, he was performing again. He took what he always had, the love for animals, and he made a little zoo. He was always getting animals like chimps and bears. We lived in wagons that were pulled by horses when we were little kids because we were born in the forties. Ellian was a one-year old in Switzerland when they were on tour with the circus there years later, she’s our youngest sister. My dad built a truck into a motorhome. He did it twice. The first one he did with a double decker bus and we lived upstairs. And then they had a little bedroom downstairs and a full kitchen, bathroom, everything. Later, he actually got a bigger van and raised the roof and made this huge mobile home by hand and we lived in it when we were little kids. They had a partition in the back so that the horse stood in the middle and then the dogs were on the side, in the back of where we lived in the front. At one point we were in Spain and he bought another horse because the one was getting unhealthy and had problems. So he found a beautiful Andalusian Pino in Spain. And my mom was actually pregnant with Ellian and he couldn’t fit where the other horse was. There was a door between us and the animals. So they opened the door and cut the floor out and they made a door out of the floor so that when we wanted to travel, they lifted that door up. And the other horse came right in the front and was in the living room of the bus. So as we drove, the horse stood in the living room. So this little horse was in front of the old horse and the old horse was jealous because he was in the living room getting treats and the old horse bit him and ended up on the living room couch, on my mom. My dad said “Stay calm. I’ll get him down, just stay.” And that is a true story. Bizarre, but true.