I was at Bed, Bath and Beyond shopping for hangers for a closet purging and organizational project when I saw the kind of broom and dustpan I need for my Downtown Clown appearance.
Archive for March 2010
searching for a little zen
At the health food store instead of purchasing my usual Brain Child or Hip Mama magazines I bought Shambhala Sun.
What’s up with that?
Well… there was this article that looked interesting; about mindful housework… ”Karen Maezen Miler on how the domestic practice of ancient Zen masters can lead us to intimate encounters with our own lives.”
Well here’s hoping.
for twitter
I just friended the boy who spit on me in 6th grade because he thought I was cute! (I thought he hated me!) Perhaps as the father of teenagers he will be able to explain to me what middle school looks from a parent’s perspective right before my own little girl takes the plunge. OMG!
for twitter: OMG I just friended the boy who spit on me in 6th grade. I thought he hated me. Apparently he did it because he thought I was cute. I hope My Kid won’t be as bewildered by adolescence as we were.
shopping for makeup in character
I was in Times Square this afternoon and since I had some time before I had to make my way back to Brooklyn to pick up My Kid after school, I decided to go to the drugstore to buy the eyeshadow and press on fingernails that I will wear Monday night in the New York Downtown Clown Revue.
Guggenheim Installation; Conceptual Art is Theatre and Clown.
The famous circular rotunda of the Guggenheim art museum was completely empty. That’s not something I would normally pay to see, but I went to the Tino Sehgal exhibit with my mom hat on because one of the neighbor kids is in it. After I got there and walked through the experience I realized how many similarities there were between the artist selected set of people interacting with the museum-goers and the work I have done as a clown working meet-and-greet gigs.
I read the program: “a visitor is no longer only a passive spectator, but one who bears a responsibility in shaping and even contributing to the actual realization of the piece”. Yeah, and that can be also true of riding the subway or going to the park, basically of living in the city.
Off-hand I can think of half a dozen writers and directors I know from the under-publicized theater scene of the Seattle in the 1990′s who could have put together a far more powerful encounter between visitors and the space. I hesitate to sound like the old “my kid could paint that” dismissal.
As I spoke one by one with with representatives of the artist’s concept as we walked together up the spiral rotunda; first a child, then a teen, then a 20-something and finally an older adult of retirement age I thought about some of the work I have done interacting with audience members as part of site specific theatrical productions. Annex Theatre’s The Yellow Kid by Brian Faker and Bliss Kolb which began with audience members walking through a back alley and up dark stairs unable to avoid interacting with the kids who were there and Nikki Appino’s ambitious Djinn in an abandoned naval base warehouse come to mind. I wish I could see what they would have made if they had been given permission to play with their ideas and a bunch of performers the Guggenheim rotunda space.
I suppose everybody can say something like that.
Awaiting the arrival of a big expensive clown show
We were talking about Broadway shows we’d like to see. I think My Kid should see The Miracle Worker or Billy Elliot. In the family evening vs couples date equation where we may as well bring My Kid since a babysitter costs more than a ticket, I could stand to see the old classics; South Pacific or West Side Story.
However,
I was talking with another clown recently and we were thinking that when Banana Shpeel opens this month we might do well to try to see it early in the run because it didn’t get good reviews in Chicago. (But, maybe, hopefully, changes will have been made and it will be a great show!)
So anyway,
I looked up online a review of the Chicago production and found one by Chris Jones who wrote, of the Chicago production, on December 3, 2009
“There is a great deal to fix before this show opens in New York early next year. But here’s a modest proposal: Hire a female clown. Or two.”
Just sayin’…
I’m being so good…
It’s 10 am and I’ve gotten my kid off to school, I’ve shined my sink the way FLYLADY says to and I’ve handwritten my Morning Pages the way Julia Cameron suggests, I’ve researched, composed and sent e-mails regarding potential solo performance options and now I’m sorting laundry. Why am I so productive during my alone time in this manner on this day. Because anything is easier than getting ready for this evenings meeting with the tax preparer.
After the long weekend
After my Pilates mat class I had extra time at the Y thanks to the other mom who took the girls to their ballet at Mark Morris. I took extra long in the steam room and thought about some clown stuff. I was going to swim laps but forgot my goggles so I walked down 6th Avenue into Greenwich Village. I bought a latte at Joe’s on Waverly but there weren’t any open seats so I kept walking and ended up at Unoppressive Non-Imperialist Bargan Books on Carmine Street where I bought essays by Virginia Woolfe and books about Tracy Ullman and Spike Mulligan with the intention of learning more about the creative processes of others. Tracy Takes On was interesting to me because I am doing a costume based character at the next Downtown Clown and I picked up The Unpublished Spike Milligan Box 18 because of all the photographs of all the scraps of ideas that the British comedian kept in his own unique filing system that he used to develop material:
Box 18 - Ideas. This contained Spikes notes. He would scribble a poem and put it in this file. Sometimes it would be incomplete and he would work on it perhaps a week or a month later, or it would be ‘chucked’. The file contained ideas for speeches, stories or sketches for one of his television programmes… When he decided to work on any one of his ideas he would sit at the typewriter and the writing simply flowed. –Norma Farnes
I would have enjoyed going to Clownlab this weekend but it got cancelled like everything else because of the snow.
It’s hard to believe Friday was a snow day today was so sunny and bright. Spring is definitely here! …unless it snows again.
