Clownmommy

My Kid is looking forward to a week of Curious Jane science camp for girls in Brooklyn. How convenient for me because another clown has organized a 4-day workshop in a studio in Manhattan the same week. How easy it will be for me to drop off My Kid at 9:00 am and sail on into the city for several hours of serious clown work before I pick her up at 3:30 (or 5:30 if I pay extra for an extended day.)

It’ll be great!

Not!

The pieces don’t quite fit together.

I’m not the one who booked the studio time which is as follows:

AUG 2 (2p-6p)
AUG 3 (2p-6p)
AUG 4 (3p-7p)
AUG 5 (6p-10p)

Well, Sugar-Honey-Iced-Tea!!!! (As My Kid and her friends would say.)

No matter how I slice it, My Kid needs to be picked up in Brooklyn at either 3:30 or 5:30 right in the middle of the studio clown time in Manhattan.

But, I’ve got a week to figure it out. I could end up hiring a babysitter for 3 or 4 hours just to cover a 30 minute gap.

It’s possible, but only just and that’s because I’ve only one kid to worry about. Any more than that and this particular studio time with other clowns wouldn’t even be an option to consider. My little family is alone here in the city. I have to pay babysitters or find friends (and we don’t yet know anyone else who will be attending the same camp as My Kid.

Last week when we were on vacation with my parents and my sister and my brother and his kids life seemed so easy. The Husband and I could go for a walk and have a conversation and not worry at all about My Kid because there were always other adults around to keep an eye on her.

Sigh.

So we’re flying out of NYC on Friday to go to Seattle to fly to Hawaii for the big 50th Wedding Anniversary Milti-family/Multi-generational vacation. And a lovely concierge woman from Hilton Waikaloa just called me on the phone to confirm my plans. AND I am afraid I sounded insane and incoherent because this is the fourth day I have spent cooped-up I mean relaxing with my lovely family.

The Husband is pointing out all the indications of phrasings of the English/American language in which I may not have been clear and precise in stating my preference for the ocean view over the standard apartment building hotel room. I hope I was clear. I hope I speak English (it’s not a given because I’m a clown and we speak… well, we speak clown) and I am not to be trusted when one wants to be clear and rational.

Just sayin’…

It’s too hot in Brooklyn today. We are all insane freaks…

So at the end of the clown jam Kendall said she’d talked with Patrick De Valette, lately of Banana Spheel. She said he might come to a clown workshop. I hope it’s one that happens when I’m in town and available.

Well, we made it to the last evening performance of Banana Spheel at the Beacon Theatre on the Upper West Side.

It wasn’t as bad as I expected given the rumors.  But, I did find myself thinking, while sitting in the theatre, “God, I do love good book musical!”, which this wasn’t.

A  proscenium stage is like a book.  I expect to be carried on a journey by the story…

The juggler with the dyed red hair had mannerisms that reminded me so much of the late Ryder Schwartz, who was always working towards a perfect 8 minutes when we were working the same gig in Nagasaki, Japan back in 1991-92.

I would have enjoyed it very much if the bald clown had stayed in the cute tiger costume for the entire second act while trying to get the show back on track. He was an adult man, a clown if-you-will. But clowns are like children. In my mommy life, I have not found much that is funnier than a 4-year-old in a superhero or vicious animal costume, who expects to be taken seriously, and doesn’t understand why he or she isn’t.

My Kid was “Spiderman” for Halloween when she was 4. She refused to wear the mask that came with the costume. She had golden curls and wore sparkly red Mary-Jane shoes with her Spiderman costume. AND YET SHE WAS OFFENDED if anyone called her “Spider Girl.” I thought that was hilarious! She didn’t.

What is it about circus people and black light displays?

David Shiner must have hated this ending, it’s so not him.

So I’m all alone in the apartment, straightening the front room getting it ready for My Kid’s piano lesson.  I’ve been such a psycho freak about it that I have driven My Kid and The Husband off to the diner for lunch without me.  I’m feeling that my life is out of control because the apartment is out of control and why am I the one who is somehow responsible for all of our household objects when I am so very unsuited to the task.  And I’m listening to NPR because what else would I be listening to and I’m listening to The Moth Radio Hour because that’s what’s on and Darryl “DMC” McDaniels from Run-DMC is on talking about how he was a closet Sarah McLachlan fan because the song “Angel” on the album “Surfacing” saved his life when he was in a deep depression.  And they met.  And he called her “God”.  And some years later they did a project together.  And what they have in common is that they were both adopted and didn’t find out until they were adults.  I love stories like that.  I also liked Dee Snider from Twisted Sister after he went on David Letterman and told the story of how he knew his parents had done their best to show that they accepted his chosen lifestyle when they gave him the gift of a top of the line Samsonite make-up case.

Last night I went to Desert Island in Williamsburg for the release party and signing of Megan Kelso’s newly published graphic novel “Artichoke Tales”.  The Husband and My Kid went to the Strand the day before when she presented with some other graphic novelists but I was in Philadelphia.

How cool is it that I know someone who was signing her own graphic novel at the store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn named “Best Comics Store in NYC” by the Village Voice in 2009 and “Best Indie Shop 2010″ in Time Out New York.  The store was in a street I know well, on Metropolitan Avenue across the street from the Brick Theatre where the New York Clown Theatre Festival takes place.  There is simpatico between comics and clowns.  As it happens one of the graphic artists in attendance was there with his wife who did stand up for years and has a buffoon-like character and knows some of the same New York clowns that I do.  Small world!

I am so proud of Megan and her book.  She talked about how it took 10 years to finish because life got in the way.  She had a kid.  She also had some other work, like “Watergate Sue” that ran on the back page of the New York Times Magazine for a while a couple of years ago.

We had dinner at their apartment when My Kid was three years old, and we were all living in Brooklyn.  Megan gave My Kid a box of pieces of scrap paper to play with.  Some of those pieces of paper had artichoke people on them.  My Kid will turn 10 this summer.  That’s how long it takes to make a graphic novel.  I’m going to hold on to that piece of information for inspiration.

There’s a clown jam this weekend.

I’m going to call my puppet-clown friend to talk about the next time we can get together next to work on our show.

And I’m also thinking about 9/11 because The Husband and My Kid and I got  together in Brooklyn with Megan Kelso and her husband and her comic artist friends on the evening of that day trying to process what had just happened.

I don’t understand why the powers that be at my daughter’s school think it’s a good idea to let the kids know at the end of the school year which class they will be in.  It was awful, for those of us who are parents, to watch the children come out of the door with tears in their eyes on the last full day of school.  They cry because they didn’t get the teacher they wanted.  They cry when they realize that next year their best friends will not be in their class. They don’t care if they have good grades.  They don’t care if their teachers wrote lovely comments about their fine class work.  They don’t even care that summer vacation is finally here. Having your best friends in your class is the most important thing in the world when you are in third grade, or fourth grade or 5th grade.  I don’t know why the powers that be don’t just send us a letter in the middle of the summer so the kids can absorb the news privately or post the class lists on the door of the school in August two weeks before school starts like they do at the elementary schools in my home town.

There is something about Brooklyn.  My life was never like this anywhere else I’ve ever lived.  I make a plan for my day, a simple ordinary plan such as I’ll take My Kid to school and then I’ll come home and do some cleaning and some laundry.     But, that’s not what happened.  Instead and old friend, one of the first mommies I met when I moved to New York, is in town with her kids.  They were at my daughter’s school and after the 4th grade publishing party we went and got coffee and walked and talked or sat and talked while her kids played in the park (because, unlike My Kid, they’re already on vacation).  They used to live here, just a couple blocks away and now they live in Uganda.

I’ve never known anyone who lived in Uganda before.  But, my friend said “Oh soon you will.  There is a huge ex-pat community in Uganda.  There are the people who work for the UN and NGO’s and then there are lots of people from places like Poland who have just moved there to see what kind of work and life they can make.”

So then I come home and I turn on my laptop and I check a clown site or  two and I click on a link from another website to John Towsen’s website, that’s John Towsen of the book CLOWNS. Well guess what his website says!  It says he’s not had time to update it much because he’s been working in Kampala, Uganda!  Hey!  That’s where my mommy friend from Fort Greene, Brooklyn lives now!

It’s going to close on Sunday and I haven’t seen it yet and I want to see it because it’s about clowns and it’s directed by David Shiner who I really admire.  I really will try.  Michael Bongar twittered that Joel Jeske will be playing Smelky at the Wednesday Matinee, but I won’t be able to get there for that.   It’s the last week of school and there are so many activities and the husband has a busy work week with evening commitments and I’m going to Philly for the day on Thursday.

Tomorrow there is a publishing party in My Kid’s classroom.  Wednesday is the 4th grade Field Day.  Friday (which is also my last Pilates reformer class) there is a Girl Scout badge ceremony.

Today is Monday.  Monday is over.

Some of the playground moms are going to try to see a Sex and the City 2 (even though we’ve heard it’s bad we still want to see it) matinee before school is over.

I have to make cupcakes for the “summer birthday’s party” and there is the last “Publishing Party” and Field Day and I have my last fitness classes before I get My Kid back and can’t go to the gym by myself anymore.