On a quiet side street in Lawrenceville, a young man in a worn tuxedo jacket taps a screwdriver into his nose with a hammer.

With the screwdriver protruding from his face, he threads a foot-long surgical needle through his right cheek, then his left.

A few kids from the neighborhood gather around, wincing and squirming and asking him if it's real and if it hurts.

The daredevil calls himself Lucky the Pain-Proof Man. He's a sideshow performer, one of the last of his kind -- far removed from a time in America when traveling bands of stuntmen and anatomical irregulars toured carnivals and county fairs with shrunken heads and papier-mache mummies.

Lucky announces to the kids in his best carney bark, "Come on back Aug. 15 and see the show! We'll have funnel cake, and Hitler's brain!"

One of the kids shouts, "You're crazy!" as he walks away. "We'll be there."

This impromptu performance was just a taste of the show Lucky plans to put on at Lawrenceville's Zombo gallery next Friday and Aug. 30. In his full act, he eats fire and light bulbs, sews buttons to his own chest and walks on flaming glass.

The show also boasts a classic assortment of believe-it-or-not gaffes in what Lucky bills as "Professor Josef Furdek's Cabinet of Curiosities," including a Fiji mermaid, Hitler's brain and "The Creature," purported to be the only live Chupacabra in captivity.

But Lucky, whose real name is Richard Swartz, is only 25, and the glory days of the sideshow came and went before he was even born. Somehow, though, he feels drawn to that era when Americans knew so much less and seemed willing to believe so much more.

"There are a lot of things I enjoy that don't exist anymore," he says. "I find myself drawn to things that no longer exist that are worth saving."

Mr. Swartz, who grew up in Aliquippa, developed a fascination with all things old and odd at an early age but found himself particularly drawn to the American 1950s, the golden era of the sideshow.

"I kind of have this view of the 1950s as the epitome of consumerism and commercialism," he said. "The economy was prosperous, everybody was happy. There were bad things that happened, but they were swept under the rug. Everybody was happy whether they liked it or not."

Mr. Swartz became interested in the classic sideshows from this era as a student at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C., and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where he earned his degree in photography.

The "Cabinet of Curiosities" began as his 2006 senior thesis at the University of the Arts and has grown from a collection of photographs to an array of meticulously constructed models and sculptures like those built by sideshow peddlers decades ago.

Mr. Swartz's own career as a sideshow stuntman began around the same time, when he was helping construct the set for Philadelphia's "Zombie Freak Out" art show.

Mr. Swartz was approached by the organizer of the "Freak Out," who asked him if he knew any sideshow performers.

"In one one-hundredth of a second, my brain worked and said, 'You're interested in the sideshow thing, lie!'" Mr. Swartz remembered. "And so I immediately said, 'Yes, I am a sideshow performer.'

"I had 10 days to become a sideshow performer, and I did."

Mr. Swartz said he used the Internet to find and contact old sideshow performers and learn their tricks, and Lucky the Pain-Proof Man was born.

But the moniker wasn't just tacked on to make the act sound authentic.

"I've been blown up twice, had my face burned off twice," Mr. Swartz said, referring to two close calls he had before his sideshow career began, one involving gun powder.

"I have the best and the worst luck at the same time. I'll fall down and break my arm, but I'll find five bucks."