More About Mab
About the Artist
Mab Just Mab is an artist shaped by a life fully lived onstage—and sustained by an instinct to keep making.
For nearly three decades, Mab built an internationally touring career in sideshow, vaudeville, circus, and character-based theater. Her work blended physical skill, musicality, humor, and risk, always grounded in deep respect for tradition and an equally deep commitment to doing things the right way. She performed across the U.S. and abroad as a fire eater, glass walker, blockhead, escape artist, emcee, comedian, musician, and ukulele devotee—often combining multiple disciplines into a single act.
Mab is a co-founder of the nationally touring Accidental Circus and a longtime core member of the award-winning Cheeky Monkey Sideshow, DC’s longest-running sideshow troupe. Her work has been featured in documentaries, books, podcasts, and film, and she is a recipient of the Circus Historical Society’s Candlelight Award and the Sideshow Hootenanny’s Big Hoot Award for her role in keeping sideshow traditions alive. Alongside her performance work, Mab has been a mentor, teacher, and community builder, including founding DCVariety, a social aid and mutual-support organization for uninsured variety artists.
While touring, Mab began solving a practical problem: how to create richer audience experiences with less physical strain. The result was Mab’s Mobile Midway.
Traditionally, the midway is the space between the front gate and the big top—the place of games, oddities, food joints, souvenirs, and sideshow attractions. Mab reimagined this as a compact, fast-to-set-up touring experience for nightclubs and festivals. She designed and fabricated original games and installations, including Goblin Knockdown (a reinvention of the classic circus “punk” game), Hover Lassos to capture “space dinosaurs,” a custom photobooth, and a miniature oddities museum. What began as a logistical solution became a fully realized creative environment built for play, storytelling, and participation.
On the faerie festival circuit, the project evolved again into the Goblin Embassy—a complete re-storying of the midway into a roving, immersive world. Functioning as a “mini faire within the faire,” the Embassy offered Goblin Combat Training, complimentary goblin makeovers, the Goblin Museum of Unnatural History, the Goblonia Passport Office, and an Embassy gift shop featuring small-run goblin-themed merchandise. It quickly became a fan favorite, not for spectacle alone, but because it invited belonging, imagination, and joy.
When the physical demands of live performance eventually made touring unsustainable, Mab still refused to stop. Instead, she shifted her energy toward supporting others.
In early retirement, Mab found herself an artist and maker with no projects—so she created them for others. She launched Mab’s Maker Grant, offering small-batch fabrication of promotional and merchandise items for artists and performers who wanted to experiment without large financial risk. She also designed and built props and set pieces, while continuing to teach workshops in fire eating, glass walking, emceeing, ukulele, and showcraft—helping foster the next generation of vaudevillians and variety performers, and keeping hard-earned traditions alive.
Alongside this work, Mab began offering her own early designs, small-run items, and experimental pieces for sale under the name Mab’s Mobile Mercantile—part midway, part workshop, part shop. What started as a background project gradually became something more substantial.
In 2025, Mab made the decision to commit fully to making and selling—online and in person—bringing together decades of performance, fabrication, storytelling, and community care under a single banner: The Crafty Carny.
Everything here carries the lineage of that journey. These are not trend-driven products. They are objects shaped by a performer who built worlds, a maker who solved problems by hand, and a community advocate who believes art should be playful, accessible, and deeply human.
If someone wrote a book about Mab’s life, people would want to read it.
This shop is part of that story—told by hand.