Clownmommy

There is a painful conflict in the minds, hearts and calendars between the women of Clowns Ex Machina committed to developing this small arts organization and the need to run the gauntlet of the New York City school search, for preschool, for kindergarten and for middle school places for our beautiful children who have completely eclipsed our stage careers.

We had a Clowns Ex Machina photo shoot this morning, in Manhattan, with the famous photographer of variety artists Jim Moore (He was the photographer in the movie Man on A Wire.) He’s so cool.  He’s so nice.  He’s so professional.

We had a good time.

We were photographed in black and white wearing our street clothes and in color with our red noses and Clown Axioms costumes on.

It makes me think of the movie The Wizard of Oz. Kansas is in black and white while Oz is in color.  I didn’t know about that special effect until I was in college because I grew up in a home with a black and white television.  I’d always assumed the whole movie was in color.

Anyway, now that this long anticipated “performance” is over my body has succumbed and I’m down with the cold I’ve been ignoring and fighting off for days.

But we are registered for middle school tours this week so I am only allowed to be ill for about 14 hours.

While we were changing costumes, I spoke with the clown mother of a 4-year-old who is in the midst of all the school tours and IQ the testing for placement in next fall’s kindergarten class.   She said was surprised how involved and time consuming the whole process has become.  Later when I caught up with The Husband and My Kid and friends from her soccer team at a local diner, the other mother and I talked about our middle school search.  Is there any other topic???  Does it ever end.  It’s like we’re single-minded children right Christmas.  What do you want?  What do you think you’re going to get?  —Except that the anticipation isn’t any fun.

I am always so flattered by what the working-artist babysitters have to say about my train wreck of an apartment.  They say things like “it’s a grown up apartment”  ”a functioning home” and “Pillows!  I aspire to pillows!”  while I am unfortunately preoccupied with thoughts of; Why do we rent a floor through when this friend and that friend own whole brownstones? There is a galley kitchen in my living room which is also my dining room which is also the playroom.  The couch in front of the only TV is our guest bedroom.  I wish I had a washer-dryer, &/or a deck,  &/or a second floor, &/or a foyer, &/or coat closet &/or a linen closet…

And yet…

OMG!

WE LIVE IN NEW YORK CITY!

I’m really only operating a week at a time at this point.

I’ve assembled complete pedestrian and clown outfits for the photo shoot on Sunday.   I still need to think about make-up and a few minor repairs (missing buttons, tube of lipstick…)  But, I’m pretty much ready for Sunday.

We’ll have to dressed and ready to go out the door well before 9:oo am ON A SUNDAY!

Ugh!

It’s about an upcoming rehearsal schedule…

I just interviewed a new babysitter.  As I write this I think, “Darn  why didn’t I ask her about her late evening availability?”  I was so busy thinking about our regular schedule and what would I like to get done if I didn’t leave the apartment at 2:30 to pick up My Kid from school and then follow her as she either went to the park for exercise which I advocate or to the library to ostensibly do homework which I also ostensibly advocate but don’t actually feel the need to be there for… so I need a babysitter…

There are a lot of things I am trying to get done this month and the chopped up day with middle school tours and YMCA Pilates mat clases and some grocery shopping and some hours spent at the laundry mat and researching and visiting  MIDDLE SCHOOLS (with and without my child) all that has to happen between 9am and 2:30 p.m. I’m just not getting enough done.

So I need some help and I’m willing to pay for it.

Looking back, I should have been paying for this all along.

But, I have always had a hard time committing to a set schedule an even as a toddler, my baby would be sleeping like a log at the appointed hour for me to transport her to the neighborhood daycare, and she and I just never quite got the whole thing worked out to my advantage…

While running a small print job as class parent, I was reminded of the difficulty I had with clerical tasks last fall while we were putting together the show Clown Axioms. Then as now, I made a special trip home in the middle of the day just to print something out and I had about 45 minutes in the apartment to accomplish the task.  However, the e-mail attachment was in Microsoft word which slowed down my Mac so much that I couldn’t even open the file until it was too late and I had to leave to go pick up My Kid from school.  By then I had also discovered that we didn’t have any printer paper and so after I picked up my kid we went to the office supply store, but it was closed, so we went to Target and by the time we got home there was half an hour to get some homework done before The Husband came home for dinner, and of course that was the time the homework was left at school and there were tears and there were time outs and dinner was delayed for hours.  And then there was the  humiliating reset of my laptop by The Husband because of something I did in the process of trying to get the Microsoft document to communicate with my Mac.  Technology is not an endeavor in which I possess an abundance of natural gifts.

And so the next morning, in the rain, I went to Kinko’s where the the inattentive counter staff and inserting of credit cards into multiple machines, adding colored paper to the tray and waiting for the clerk to void a mistake made the whole thing take far longer than I ever would have guessed when I first read the e-mail about the form to copy and distribute. What ever can go wrong will go wrong.

I just looked at  a couple of modest apartments for sale on the Cocoran real estate website and now I feel a kind of ill.

I woke up last night at 2:00 am.  I couldn’t get back to sleep so I got on my laptop and googled and re-googled Insideschools reading the reviews of District 13 middle schools that my daughter is eligible to attend.  I thought about the school I toured yesterday —the school that appalled the mothers from Brooklyn Heights.  That middle school was one of the top three District 13 choices for almost every 5th grade parent I asked at our elementary school last year.

I input my zip code on a website to find out what other middle schools are nearby.  Three schools came up.  One was a selective school in District 15 ten blocks from our home and open only to students from District 15.  The well organized photo and information filled website had a graph.  It showed which selective high schools had accepted how many of that middle school’s 8th grade graduates the previous year. The two District 13 middle schools listed my zip code did not even have links their own websites, not even the boring government-issued default New York City Department of Education template.

I googled “District 13″.  I googled “District 15″.

I wondered why all the selective schools in District 13 are also open to students from districts 14, 15, 16, and 17 but all the selective schools in District 15 are only open to District 15 students.

I googled “separate but equal”.  I googled “segregation”.

I was still awake at 5:00 am.