Time was, kids ran away from home when they wanted to rebel.  And where they ran to was often that most sandy, cotton-candy, popcorn pandery of sumptuous refuges: the circus.

Now, when you join the circus, you're joining the most middle-class of places.  Where vast trailer-cities inhabit urban parks and spaces for months on end.  Where huge numbers of Teamsters with shiny yellow hardhats imprinted with "Big Apple Circus" and über-green mesh vests grunt to erect the tent poles after the hydraulic lift raises high the Big Tent in a latter-day mini-McKinley plum in the throat of the city.

Packed end to end and neatly lining all of Damrosch Park not otherwise occupied by the loden-green waxed tarp Big Top spread near the bandshell of Lincoln Center, outdoors, are dozens – dozens – of trailers, for living, office space, animal housing; for kitchening, for safety gear, and for who-knows-what.

The manager of the circus takes us around to get our hardhat and vest, and tells us she and her husband live on the grounds, in their spiffy 30-foot-long trailer, for the entire four months the circus is in town.

"I know – it's a dream, isn't it?  We get to live in the city, the best place to live, for the whole time we're here!"  She beams in delight.  They have to pay for trailer rental, but it's not a patch on the sky-high rent or mortgage that we locals have to shell out to hang in the zip she's temping in.

We are speaking of the fun and fab Big Apple Circus tarp-raising, to which a very select few were invited, with the gala galaxy of elephants and horses, clowns and acrobats scheduled to "open" the 21^st of October and last through January 2016.

We were duly decked out in white hardhat (we were allowed to keep) and lime-green neon mesh work vest (which we had to give back; boo).

A small white pony no bigger than a breadbox was on hand – wearing its own ineffably hilarious blue hardhat and falling-off lime work vest.  "Safety, you know," we were advised.

Towering over the 25 or so union circus heavies, Council Member Helen Rosenthall and Borough Beep Gail Brewer, a sprinkling of newsies, including us – and a 20-foot-tall stilt-man in bright red long-leg pants, an Uncle Sam straw campaign-hat, bright suspenders, and striped shirt and bowtie.  And universal sad-clown greasepaint makeup.

We watched with childish glee, hoving up childhood memories of what the circus used to mean when we were toddlers and our parents schlepped us to the sawdust.  Unfeigned smiles split our faces as the Big Top rose from the ground up, up, up – until it mountained high above the Damrosch Park concrete.  We journalists walked into the dim tent, only two teardrop openings in the tarp "ceiling" to let in the bright, gorgeous Indian Summer sunlight to dispel the dark under the vast tent.  Soon the workmen hoisted up poles to widen the entrance and let in more light.

But what got us, as the "raising the canvas" ceremony and quick Boro prez Brewer boilerplate welcome went out over us and the hundred bunched cables snaking the concrete ground, was that directly overhead was a scary apparition.

We caught our breaths.

Directly overhead, maybe 35 feet or so above our white or yellow (or pony-blue) hardhats, not far, humming and buzzing, flashing tiny laser lights in green and purple, was a small cotillion of…black metal drones.  These were not the cheapos, either.  They were in the range – we asked – of several-thousand-dollars type of high-tech outta-control gimmickry that sends a shiver down the spines of news-aware viewers.

They hovered like UFOs over us, their spindly legs angled, starchy and spooky.  Possibly there taking our picture, possibly sent by circus management.  Or by local hobbyists.  Municipal military?  We did not know to whom they belonged.  We did not get a heads-up on their "mission," if mission there was.  We just kind of hunched into our shoulders, empathizing with the Kurds and Syrians and Iraqis who labor under hordes of these gravity-defying metalware, in their cases, dropping ordnance or lethal firepower.

It's not a stretch to empathize with the scattering civilians and soldiery of those Middle Eastern hotspots.  We were just witnessing the harmless opening of the annual Big Apple circus – but were unwilling sitting ducks under a semi-pestilential, unasked for mini-infestation of costly aerial war gadgetry.  We couldn't escape them, couldn't remove them, couldn't battle them.  Or figure out what they were doing.  For all our safety gear and gorgeous 75-degree sunny mid-October day in the confines of a world-famous landmark, we felt, all of us, obscurely invaded.

And slightly, but not mildly, scared.  We imagined, easily, the future, not more than a few days ahead, where drones are unsightly guests at our picnics, assignations, or daily hikes.  An unwelcome guest at our events without tangible news value, but with shivery implied threat.  It is, in the end, a sharp reminder that military appurtenances are not just a part of the faraway drama, the battle theatres of News at Eleven.

Frankly, it is not an image that inspires any kind of confidence. You can maybe get the kid out of the circus, but you can't get the circus and its unnerving concomitants out of your back yard.