Clownmommy

I went running in the morning, just around the park, just for half an hour.  But, by evening my hip hurt and after googling I think it is bursitis.  That’s not who I think I am.  That’s not how I move in the world.

I was multi-tasking, can’t get out of the apartment alone for very long, need some physical exercise (I want to juggle my fat around and really annoy it until it decides to leave me forever) and some time to think about the piece, and was thinking of it as a physical warm-up for a creative day.  

When I found out I had been accepted in to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, not yet 20 years ago, I began almost immediately to run several miles a day in the swampy Washington, D. C. heat with a significant number of push ups and sit ups every day.  Clown College was like boot camp, a large percentage of the students were just out of high school and most were male.  I had flexibility and stamina but I lacked upper body strength (my entire experience of flying trapeze was taking one swing out over the mat and sliding off onto the mats below).  I was not one of the students singled out special trapeze work.  I was pretty thrilled to be one of the small flexible women who were pulled out to be taught some two person basket hanging move (the name of which I can’t remember even though I desperately want to write it to prove will know I’m not lying and actually did once know circus people) for an idea the director had for clowns falling out of a flying kite.

I am working now as a stage clown, different from that kind of circus clown in that the gymnastics are emotional not physical.  In Europe clown is an older person’s game.  I wish I had seen Deborah Kauffman’s clown piece “Veni Vidi Vici” this past weekend, as I had planned.  She’s a local female clown role model.  But, The Husband’s sudden business trip required me, as The Mom, to make my priority family time and not ditch them to go into Manhattan for some obscure theatre that only I wanted to see.

What was so disturbing about that woman in the park was the way we didn’t exist to her and yet she felt comfortable telling us to do things (Is she someone accustomed to hired help???)  She never acknowledged us as people.

When someone trips and falls in the street, most people kind of freeze until the person gets up off the ground or it is clear that someone else helping them up.  They don’t stand next to them and say, “Could you press that crosswalk button for me.”  

It’s not like the playground was crowded and she hadn’t seen or heard the drama of the smashed finger.  There were only the two women with toddlers and us.

After the fact, I was shaking.  I had yelled back at her as I left; “Fuck you, my kid’s bleeding!”

I didn’t realize how shocked and upset I was until after I did that.

We were having an uneventful afternoon in the apartment when the buzzer rang and it was My Kid’s friend. She and her brothers were riding their scooters and soon My Kid was with them in the park, all 4 of them flying down the walkway in the park looking like a commercial for some kind of organic yet commercially available snack food.  Then they went into the playground.

In the playground a couple of toddlers were walking around with their anxious mothers following close behind them–just like we used to do, back when we were shocked that there were dangerous older kids wildly hurtling their tough bruiser bodies around with abandon.  That was until the first physically gifted 3-year-old in our set learned to ride a bike without training wheels.  Are you nuts!  You can’t let that baby out anywhere near the street!!!!  

Our kids today were 5, 6 and just barely 8.  Big compared to a toddlers but still babies in the real world.  Our parent talk was about schools and neighborhoods and Freakonomics.  We were aware enough of the larger playground environment to yell at our kids to get off the baby swings because real babies needed to use them (this particular playground only has baby swings).  We were discussing the next playground to visit (Parents and caregivers make the rounds of playgrounds on a daily basis, like a bunch of frat boys on a Friday night pub crawl.)

One of the toddler mothers called out from about 15 feet away; “Could you watch the Razors there are babies.” Playground etiquette requires saying “hello” to other parents, or at least going up to them and making eye-contact before you tell them that you think their kid is doing something wrong.

I’m just sayin…

Anyway, our kids got off their scooters, and were playing around, and then we hear a scream.  A loud and sustained scream from the cast iron gate by the swings where My Kid and Her Friend were both standing frozen and screaming.  We looked up, my parent friend and I.  We stood up, my parent friend and I.  Then I ran over when we realized it was MY KID who was screaming. She had (or her friend had) smashed her finger in the cast iron gate.

Oh My God!!

Run to the kids.  Look at the finger.  Screams in the air.  Fear.  (back ground mind emergency protocol kicks in; going through the mental rolodex…–”Where is the insurance card?.. Which emergency room do we use?.. Car service phone number?…)  Take the kid with the finger to the cold water of the drinking fountain.  Examine the wound.  It hurts.  There’s blood.  Bruising and swelling.   But she can move the finger and ice and a bandage will be the treatment.

And yet, it is still traumatic.

 The plans to move to another playground have been abandoned.  I will take My Kid home and Her Friend and her brothers will be taken to their home.  Outside activities suddenly curtailed.  A bummer end to an impromptu playdate that was going so well.

As I was struggling out the playground gate guiding my sobbing bleeding child with one hand and juggling her sports equipment with the other, while simultaneously saying a forced cheerful goodbye to Her Friend (who is either guilt-ridden or afraid of being punished) and her brothers (who don’t know why their outside time has been suddenly cut short) and their parent (who must be thinking “Damn!”)  I hear the breathy passive-aggressive voice of the mother of one of the toddlers right beside me, “Could you shut the gate.”

After we finally get through the opening, I reach back and push at the gate with my arm  without even looking behind me (most parents and caregivers, myself included, turn back and face the gate checking for little escapees while pulling it closed and working the latch) 

I walk with my sobbing child for about 10 feet.

Then it hits me.

I suddenly yell without thinking…

“Fuck you, my kid’s bleeding!”

I feel incompetent that I didn’t get a picture into the program.  In the end it doesn’t really matter because I look enough like the two other white women, who are performing in the cabaret on the same night as me, that it doesn’t really matter that I didn’t get a photo of my own in on time.  But still, in the context of the pictures that were chosen for the brochure–we had high enough quality photographs of Lorraine’s work.  I should have gotten something in.  I’m lame.

Somewhere between the drama of the Olympic Games and the idiocy of America’s Funniest Videos lies the world of clown.  I’m not getting to watch as much of the Olympics as I thought I would (because my kid is not interested and I’m not going out of my way to sell it.)  I’m not very competitive.  I’m the opposite.  As a kid I met every competitive situation certain that the others were better than I was.  I daydreamed in the outfield and would get hit on the head by the ball because I wasn’t paying attention.  Keeping a number score wasn’t interesting to me because there was no story.  It’s the backstories of the athletes that bring tears to my eyes and make me want to watch the competitions.   It’s the shock of the unexpected on America’s Funniest Videos that make My Kid Laugh.   In both cases it’s all about the face and the body.  Words are unnecessary.

I think I can officially say we are in production.  Lorraine and I have sent several e-mails back and forth today about gaps in the outline and which puppets need to be made.  That’s kind of cool.  On the other hand, I played with my kid in the apartment and it looks worse than it did when we got up this morning.  And, I’m not keeping up with putting away as we go along because I keep sneaking away from the pretend car/restaurant/dog run to check my e-mail and think about the piece.  At the same time I was trying to be really zen about letting My Kid decide what she wanted to do and being her playmate since as a parent I have noticed that it has been a while since she has engaged with her toys and that imaginative play that is so important that I take studio workshops to do it as an adult.  But the “play” that clowns do in the studio bears very little resemblance to my kid pretending to do the things I do which make me crazy when I play with her because I want to be going to the real store and really cleaning and going outside and running real errands.  I feel like a hostage in her imaginary car under the table with the dolls in their car seats folding and unfolding the toy stroller again and again.  Been there done that, don’t want to pretend today.  I feel guilty.  But, My Kid is at an age where she will watch the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon for hours on end and then talk like a sarcastic TV tween for the rest of the day.  I don’t know which is worse.  My Kid is going to be so dissappointed when she gets to high school and her campus doesn’t look like the Getty Museum with latte carts the way it does on Zoey 101.  And don’t tell me it won’t happen.  I was really traumatized when my first “real” job and life after college weren’t anything like the Mary Tyler Moore Show.

I was anxious to get to the theatre.  I was running late because I had to wait for someone to show up to watch My Kid.  The dressing area was hot and crowded.  My parents were on hand for this important performance.  We thought we had time to grab something to eat before the performance.  The Thai food took a long time and I didn’t have a watch on.  When I got backstage everyone else was in full costume and the show was in progress.  How soon till my scene.  No time to warm up or clear my head.  The others were lining up on the stairs waiting for the curtain call.  I had missed the entire show.

It was a actors nightmare, so clear and real that I was genuinely relieved when I woke up in a panic and realized I was at home in my own bed.

So I’m up in the middle of the night and googling the other performers who I will meet at the clown theatre festival and I look up clownlink, which I haven’t read in a while and Adam mentioned my blog and how it petered out just when I got to the part about him, so I looked it up and…  I did click publish before I sent it.  Whoops!  Didn’t mean to do that.  But, I remember I did want to make the effort to post something during that show’s three day run.  There is more to the story.  But I’m not going to write it now!  it’s a quarter to 3 in the morning.  Of course I would get caught and called out publicly for making a blogging mistake.  How very clown of me.

Me and My Kid, we didn’t have any plans today. On our first day back from Toronto we were slow to get going day because the rain made for a dark and claustrophobic morning.  My Kid watched the recorded “So You Think You Can Dance Season Finale” while I stretched, read the New York Clown Theatre Festival brochure online, and e-mailed back and forth with Lorraine about our upcoming 15 minutes of fame. 

We had to play store and then restaurant before I could get My Kid out the door to run errands like going to a store.  Who is to say that Target is more real than the plastic cash register arranged at the foot of the bed.  The experience is essentially the same.

My Kid stands on the table in her underwear and sings into her white plastic Hannah Montana microphone with a purity that I can only wish for in my performance.

At the hotel, I picked up Tracy Chevalier’s book “the Virgin Blue” (by the author of “Girl With A Pearl Earring”) and have been reading it on the train. Because I have access to Bluetooth I have access to the internet and because I have access to the internet, I googled Tracy Chevalier http://www.tchevalier.com/students.html
and found her website where she has written answers to frequently asked questions:
This is my favorite:

What do you do when you have writer’s block?

Writer’s block is for wimps – or men. I have only ever heard men complain of writer’s block. Frankly, I have so little time to write (only during my son’s school hours) that I can’t afford to be blocked. If I reach a sticky point, I do some research, read around the subject – that’s what’s so handy about writing historical novels, there’s always one more source to read.[return to questions]

I also love her open letter to students. She seems like a very nice person, helpful and patient considering her fame and creative success. Well, she is a mommy after all.

One of my New York “Dorothy, you’re not in Kansas anymore” moments took place at one of our regular playgrounds in Brooklyn few years ago. We were chatting and chasing toddlers and Jennifer Egan and Sheri Holman were comparing notes on the difficulties of doing a book tour while nursing infants.