Clownmommy

Today My Kid told me that the Urban Assembly School Of Math and Science for Young Women is her first choice and  NEST (New Explorations into Science, Technology & Math) is her second choice.  She’s nine!

Yikes!

Why doesn’t she want to audition for the public school for dance or one of those schools that specializes in theater or art???  After all we’re living in New York City for Pete’s sake!

I feel like one of those parents who wants their kid to be a doctor or a lawyer while the kid is planning to sing or design clothes.

When I was 9 years old, I aspired to be the featured baton twirler featured on TV during football halftime.

It must be The Husband that My Kid is taking after.

Or, maybe it’s the mass media that is affecting my child.  As I write this, she’s watching a tween sitcom on Nickelodeon in which the plot revolves around a member of a boy band who disguised himself as a girl to attend an all girl school where the girls and their teacher insult the intelligence of boys.

I found the website of an arts consulting group online, entirely unrelated to anyone I’ve ever met or have any intention of meeting.

So today, (while waiting for the landlord and the exterminator to stop by to spray for cockroaches in advance, and as a precaution… haven’t seen one yet, knock wood… but the weather is getting warm… and we do live in an apartment in New York City…  I noticed someone threw out a mattress and box spring yesterday (…La, La La…Don’t want to think what THAT could mean!) I have been reading about; Strategic Planning, the Judo Strategy, Scenario Planning, and the Balanced Scorecard Approach.

I also remembered the joke, “Q: How many Annex Company members does it take to change a lightbulb?  A: 51: Fifty to hold a company meeting about it, and One to say F*** it, I’ll do it myself!”

And then I googled Annex Theatre and read on that website the names of all the plays produced during the years The Husband and I were there.

Full disclosure: we got free tickets.

But, it is likely I would have gone anyway, and taken my offspring–even though the posters in the subway did nothing to endear me to this edition’s apparent theme of eggs and bugs.

OMG, can I tell you how cool it is to get free tickets to a Cirque du Soliel show just because I am part of some vast blogging mommy syndicate.  It’s really cool.  I mean free tickets to Corteo was a big incentive when, several years ago, I worked a Cirque du Soleil opening night party gig, as part of  ”Kendall Cornell’s Soon-to-be-world-famous Women’s Clown Troupe”.

It was a little odd that the swag offered by the representatives of Cirque du Soleil at the mommy blogger event was only ONE ticket.  I mean, we’re blogging mommies, as in we blog because we need to communicate with the outside world and our lives are set up so that we can barely have a conversation with our spouses about bills and dental appointments.  But, I was one of the lucky ones.  Me and another Brooklyn mom got the vouchers from suburban and or Philly mom’s who wouldn’t be in town for the offered Wednesday or Thursday shows so we got to take our daughters, who got along amazingly well for a couple of fourth graders from different schools, who don’t really remember how they were such good friends in their morning preschool class for 3-year-olds.

It was a really good show!  The images seemed stronger than those in the last Cirque du Soleil show The Husband and I took My Kid to.  This one, while there was the “Bug’s Life” theme a bit, was really fun, in part, because they had six adorable Chinese acrobats dressed (as someone else said)  like “Teletubbies”, who spun the standard apparatus in unison and the props looked like slices of kiwi and ears of corn.  I don’t know why we liked that so much, but we did.

Michelle Matlock was one of the clowns, I don’t know her–but-less-than-six-degrees-of-separation: she did something with Amy G who was in a couple of the same shows I was in at Annex in Seattle.  As the love-interest ladybug she was pretty one dimensional–not given enough to do as far as I’m concerned.  Even her costume seemed to lack the detail and shading of the male clown bugs. (WTF???!!!)  I imagine that to be the result of artistic choices imposed on her from above.  But, kudos to her for getting to originate a role!

Anyway, we loved the trampoline/climbing wall spectacle at the end.

While I was watching the show, my thoughts did turn for a moment to Spencer Novich (who I met at a David Shiner workshop), who just graduated from NYU has been hired by Cirque du Soleil and is moving to Las Vegas for same.  I hope they use him well.  He’s very good.

With my mind still full from the New York City Moms Blog Brand & Blogger Symposium, I am excited to learn that Clowns Ex Machina is working with  Vani Krishnamurthy, an arts consultant who graduated from the Harvard Business School.

Today, it seems that both my blogging and my clowning are developing in a slick professional manner.

I made sure and charged the battery to my camera, but I didn’t think I charged it long enough.  My Kid had her open (for parents to watch) ballet class at the Mark Morris dance studio today.  So after school I picked up my kid and walked with her friends and their babysitter to their apartment to do homework before dance class.  I took my camera out of my purse.  I had my charger in my purse for this very purpose…  So after I took the battery out of the camera, which I set on the table, and was looking for an outlet for the charger…  My Kid’s friend’s babysitter knocked over a glass of water which got water inside my digital camera so it wouldn’t work during my child’s public dancing and who knows if it will ever work again.  Aghhhhh!!!!!!!

In a NYT article about the lack of strong leading women roles on Broadway this year, producer Arielle Tepper Madover said she worried that the dearth of great female-centered work remains partly due to family responsibilities for women, who are reluctant to sacrifice nights and weekends to rehearsals or leave their children behind to produce or direct shows out of town or on the theater touring circuit.  She was referring to the kinds of directors, women, who are attracted to plays with strong female roles and have the means to shepherd the play through developmental process and the producers who get behind the show and gather the millions of dollars required for a Broadway production.

“Going to the theater every night, standing in the back to watch how your show is coming together, and staying late to give feedback — let alone going to Chicago for a pre-Broadway try-out — is not something a lot of us can do,” said Ms. Madover, who has three young children.

I can relate.  My Kid turned one shortly after we moved to New York.  I didn’t audition for anything because when I did the math the equation I came up with was that paying a babysitter market rate to stay with my kid for the hours it took to ride the train into Manhattan, wait to be seen and ride the train home was a cash up front and do it again for a callback meant that for each audition I needed to be prepared to pay about one hundred dollars.  I just couldn’t justify it even though I had finally made it to New York.  It was frustrating, but I made peace with it.  Our  life as a family has been more fulfilling spending evenings and weekends together.  The Husband and I are probably still married because I didn’t met him each evening, when he came home from the office, by standing at the door with my coat already on, ready to hand over the baby and dash off to rehearsal or performance only to return after they had both gone to sleep.

I was in one play when My Kid was three years old.  It was the result of a developmental process of more than a year, that produced a fascinating original piece of theatre called SIX.  The diverse cast of six women, three Black and three white, ranging from new mother to retired grandmother.  The production was spearheaded by the mother of a toddler who had been a professional director.  We rehearsed once a week late evening after the toddlers were in bed and performed in a church.  Few saw it.  It was never remounted.

I didn’t look for another opportunity to perform on stage until My Kid was in kindergarten.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/theater/theaterspecial/16women.html

So today I attended my very first ever mommy blogger event in Tribeca. There was a red carpet for us to walk on. How fun is that?

In the studio we work in silly clothes and red noses.  At the gym I wear sweats which I then wear to after school pickup.  If I’ve been cleaning or grocery shopping or writing at home I’m in jeans and any old shirt with my hair pulled back.

Yesterday I left the clown jam early to go to the blogging and branding event in Tribeca.

The other women took a break shortly thereafter.

They came into the bathroom where I was putting on makeup.  I was wearing new jeans with heels and a push up bra, under my black blouse.  My hair was down with product in it.

One of the women was startled when I spoke because she hadn’t recognized me.

Either I clean up good or I’ve really let myself go.

I did enjoy being told that I was part of a powerful group of women, both economically and politically.

I promise to use my blogging power for good.

The roundtable discussion about blogging and branding and that was pretty interesting.  I haven’t been involved in a discussion about getting paid for the work that we do…Oh wait, I do theatre (Mike Daisey explains it best)….Oh wait, I’m a mom… Oh, wait…, I volunteer at My Kid’s school…

That woman was right when she quoted her husband who said, “There is no way a group of men would be still blogging for free diaper bags“

OK, I was feeling good, now I’m depressed.

No, wait, I won’t get discouraged.  Some mom bloggers get free stuff to blog about and then they write about so much stuff they end up being hired by marketing companies.

Now I am really getting off course.  I’m a clown, not an ad exec

So anyway.

It was a fun work day first in the studio with the women clowns at a studio in the Fashion District then at the blogging mom event in Tribeca.

So after yummy Brooklyn supper on the the stoop of delivery  from The Smoke Joint I sit here now here I write on my MacBook while My Kid who was very excited about the Bejeweled video game and bottles of Powerade Play sports beverage I brought back from today’s event is enjoying her bath with the blue robot bath bomb from LUSH and soap from Carol’s Daughter–OK I’ll stop.

I was really nervous about attending this mom blogger event, meeting over 50 people who all write for public consumption is quite a lot to take in at once.  And there was the matter of the clown jam.

On Thursday when I was in Manhattan to have lunch with The Husband, I went to the Gap and bought a new pair of jeans, dark blue so that my legs would look thinner.  I knew I couldn’t wear what I usually wear.  I had to step it up a notch to make myself presentable.  I don’t know why we do that, don’t go to the effort to look good all the time, oh yeah, it’s a little bit time consuming.

In the morning as part of my getting ready, putting together two outfits for two completely different activities, clowning and PR networking, I was also focused on making sure that the toaster, the bread, the peanut butter and the washed apples were clearly visible so that My Kid could feed herself if The Husband was otherwise occupied.  So when it came time to print the e-mail with the address so that I could be organized and have it in my purse and the printer was out of ink and wouldn’t print…I started to shake.   Then when I had to wait longer than expected for a train…I had say meditative phrases to myself.  And when I came up onto the street at Penn Station I was thinking maybe I shouldn’t go into the studio at all, I will be late and then I will have to leave early, it will be so disruptive I should just call with my regrets, I tried to do too much today.  It wasn’t working out. I didn’t want to be disruptive by both coming late and leaving early.  I was only 10 or 15 minutes late to a 3 hour studio session.  Even though I had brought the Girl Scout cookies one of the clowns had purchased from my daughter, with me in my bag, yet another item on the list, I wanted to cancel.  But, the message on my phone, so casual, the door will be closed but we’re in studio 1.  So I went.  It wasn’t a big deal.  It would have been if it had been a rehearsal, but it was just studio time.