ÉPÉE LADY Holliday prepares to swallow her pride.

When the Coney Island Circus Sideshow opens for the new season on Sunday 23, its performers will have contributed their fair share of sweat equity. The freak collective recently bought the building on Surf Avenue and West 12th Street that it’s called home for 12 years, which means the tattooed ladies, glass-eaters and other human curiosities had to spend the winter pitching in with renovations. (The gift shop is being expanded, as is the entrance to the Coney Island Museum.) Resident saber eater Heather Holliday, 22, took a break from painting to talk to TONY about occupational hazards and why keeping her skills sharp year-round is essential.

It must be weird for you guys to hammer nails into the wall, rather than in your noses.
This is the only off-season that Coney Island USA could employ us to help out. We ripped up the floors and broke through walls with sledgehammers. Mostly, I’ve been getting dirty—and it’s been fun. You know these long thingies that hold the ceilings up? I collected those and I’m going to make fire torches and batons with them.

Do you still practice with your swords in the off-season?
You have to. You need to remind your body, “This is what I do, don’t forget.” I don’t think there’s anything more embarrassing than trying to get a sword down in front of people and not being able to.

How did you learn to swallow swords?
[Sideshow pro] Todd Robbins explained sword swallowing as a series of steps in suppressing your gag reflex. So I began gagging myself with my toothbrush handle, a spoon handle—all sorts of handles. When I first started, there were hardly any other girls doing it. Women usually get booked over boys, for obvious reasons—the sexual innuendo.

How many swords have you swallowed?
We do ten shows a day—that’s 50 shows a week, 200 a month. Wow, a lot. But because I do really big swords, I’ve had seriously bad heartburn. It’s all the stomach acid going in and out with the sword. I didn’t know what heartburn was. I mean, I knew the commercials. But I was like, “Heartburn’s for fat, greasy truckers.”

Any other injuries?
When I was first learning, all of a sudden I woke up and couldn’t swallow. It was my epiglottis, that little flap that covers the windpipe. I irritated it.

Do your parents know you’re in a freak show?
My mom really likes it, but she wants it to be a phase. Everybody that thinks it’s really cool wouldn’t want their own kid doing it. My dad didn’t even know I did the show for two years. He thought I was going to ballet or yoga every day. I could just see him dragging me offstage by my hair, stopping the show: “Heather, get down here right now!” And I’d be really embarrassed, like, “Da-aad.”

The Coney Island Circus Sideshow opens Mar 23, 2008.