Clownmommy

We were in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania this weekend.  It’s not at all like Brooklyn. The biggest lifestyle difference was driving everywhere.  There were things that reminded me of Montana where I grew up and Nebraska where my parents grew up, historic places and times where and when we could go around on our bikes by ourselves as kids.   My friend lives in a beautiful neighborhood of cul-de-sacs that has much in common with the home of my relatives in Orange County, California, beautiful houses on a hill but nowhere for a kid to ride a bike.

 Sometimes I fantasize about living in a house in a neighborhood where my kid can go outside by herself and have some autonomy.  But, that’s not possible in many suburbs, built in my lifetime, without sidewalks or street lights.  I wouldn’t let my kid ride her bike along the side of the two lane highway anymore than I would let her ride up Fulton and cross Flatbush on the way to school or a friend’s house in Brooklyn. Whatever happened to riding your bike and playing with the neighborhood kids and “Come home for dinner when the street lights come on.”?

 Pennsylvania was insurance company calendar rural instead of what I think of as farmland which is mile after mile of mathematically straight rows of wheat and corn with giant tractors and combines.

Subtext being the presidential campaign, it was gratifying to have the woman selling pumpkins by the side of the road and the biker chick waitress at a restaurant both complement me on my Obama t-shirt.

Our friends  took us to Lake Tobias Animal Park, a family farm that has been turned into a zoo.  I wore my bright orange Obama Mama t-shirt, but nobody commented at all.  I’l bet the people there saw it with disdain and disapproval. The tour driver told us they called the longhaired breed of Scottish highland cattle on display, “hippie cows”.

The kids loved Lake Tobias, a popular local school field trip destination.  It was disturbing (although not deeply disturbing if I thought of it as a farming operation) to ride in a topless bus and watch people give crackers to small children who held them out to the bison that loped up to the side of the vehicle.  This, goes against everything I know about wild animals.  But, I suppose technically these were not wild because they live with a steady parade of topless busses full of outstretched arms and crackers.  Who knew such eclectic private zoos existed?   It was bizarre to see elk and yaks and water buffalo together in the same pasture

 I grew up with regular visits to the National Bison Range in Moiese, Montana. (The Snake Pit tourist trap on I-90, notwithstanding, it was the closest thing we had to a zoo.)  When comparing notes on our childhoods with a college roommate who grew up in Annapolis, Maryland we discovered that the big 3rd grade field trip where she was from was a day at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.  At Lewis and Clark Elementary in Missoula, Montana, the big 3rd grade trip was to the bison range maintained by the US Department of Fish and Wildlife Services.  The bison range is deeply educational, you can go there and experience the animals as brown spots miles away because the 18,500 acre preserve is experienced via a one-way 2-hour car drive.  (There is oh so much for a disaffected teen to ignore and it’s the kind of place where parents feel compelled to go to battle with their children to put away the novels and video games in order to look for the distant wildlife that only adults paying attention can see.) There is ample time to read the brochure cover to cover learning more than anyone outside of the Department of Interior needs to know about native prairie grasses, birds, rodents and the breeding habits of the elk, deer, bighorn sheep, antelope and black bears that share the range with the bison. 

Because of our visit to the Lake Tobias wildlife park in Pennsylvania, I now understand how it is that the tourists in Yellowstone National Park come to make the kind of stupid mistakes that get them killed.  In Montana we never cease to marvel at the tourists whose deaths and injuries we read about every summer in the local paper.  They are gored while walking toward a moose or a bison in order to pose for a picture, or got between a mother bear and her cubs on a trail or most mind-blowing of all to a kid raised in the Rockies, attract bears by cooking in their tent.

At the playground today, some kids, including mine, played an assortment of made up games with a deflated purple basketball that had a hole big enough to use as a handle.  I can’t say that I openly encourage such “creative” play, but when I see it happen I do my best to slide into the background because it’s the kind of play, with whoever else happened to be outside, that I remember from my childhood.  It doesn’t happen often in this era of playdates and professionally supervised enrichment.  Such activity cannot, by definition take place under the watchful eye of an adult –since the job description of adult includes identifying the toy as garbage, throwing it away and producing a new one.  

However…

I did feel obligated to step in when the basketball got stuck sitting on the top of a hoop and one of the little boys started throwing a brick up into the air in an attempt to knock it down.

I miss those days when the Republican would win again and we would shake our heads and be depressed for a while and then move on because it really was just politics and budgets.  Then Gore won the election but George Bush II ascended to the Oval Office and WTO happened, and 9/11 happened, and Enron happened, and Iraq happened, and Katrina happened…

…and the Mortgage Crisis happened, Hurricane Ike barely made the news as Wall Street happened, and now Sarah Palin encouraging the crazy angry people to get all riled up.

Yesterday I received an e-mail, forwarded to me by Kendall Cornell.  The Women’s Theatre project was papering their Off-Broadway house for a play about a clown.  So I went.  It was a much nicer theater than the ones I usually get to play.  The stage was large and the grid was jam-packed with lighting instruments. Most of the primary people involved in the production listed a Yale degree in their bios.  That theatre seemed out of my reach and yet the play was obviously written by someone who is not very old and reminded me of shows we produced at Annex Theatre in Seattle where, incidentally, quite a few company members had gone to or would go on to Yale.

After the play, “Aliens with Extraordinary Skills” by Saviana Stanescu (MFA, NYU); directed by Tea Alagic (MFA, Yale); featuring Natalia Payne (BA, Yale); Set Design by Kris Stone (MFA, Yale); Costumes by Jennifer Moeller (MFA, Yale); Lighting Design by Gina Scherr (MFA, Yale); Music and Sound design by Sarah Pickett (MFA, Yale), I walked alone to the Times Square subway station.

My heart raced, as I looked at the marquees and the after theatre crowd brushed by me with their playbills in their hands.  I was remembering my very first trip to New York.  I took the train from Washington D. C. (where I had an internship in the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee when Geraldine Ferrarro was running for Vice President on the Democratic ticket with Walter Mondale) to visit Kathy McNenny, who I knew from home.  She was attending Julliard and living in a room, not much bigger than her mattress, in a very scary building in Hell’s Kitchen across the street from Studio 54.  I was afraid I would be raped every time I got on the elevator.

I saw 6 shows in about 48 hours.  I went with Kathy and her boyfriend to see a play at The Irish Rep because a friend of theirs was in it.  There was a lot of real dirt on the stage.  I saw ” A Chorus Line” because I had always wanted to see it.  I had received the album as a birthday present in grade school and had listened to, memorized, and performed, for my drama class, a deeply felt rendition of “Nothing” (just like all the other high school theater geeks my age).   After “A Chorus Line” I went directly to another theatre to see Whoopi Goldberg’s late night performance, because Kathy told me that was the must see show everyone was talking about.  I was blown away proclaiming that we would soon hear of her in Montana.  ”The Color Purple” was in movie theaters the next year.  As soon as I woke up I went directly to the TKTS booth in Times Square to see what I could see.  I wanted to see “Sunday in the Park with George” because I wanted to sing like Bernadette Peters, even though my voice teacher was always telling me not to (apparently I had a lovely voice of my own or some such drivel…)  But, there were no TKTS tickets for “Sunday in the Park with George” so I got a ticket to “Forbidden Broadway” and went and sat on the ground outside the box office of the theatre where “Sunday in the Park with George” was playing and waited with a few other people until curtain time to see if there were any returns.  I blushed with pride when someone in the ticket line, told me I looked like a real New Yorker and not at all like a tourist, sitting there on the ground and scribbling in a notebook, in my dark oversized coat full of pockets.  The woman in the ticket booth told me she had some obstructed view seats but they weren’t worth it because they were way off to the side and you couldn’t see the amazing set come and go.  So I waited until almost 8 o’clock and then ran down the street to use my ticket to “Forbidden Broadway” which I didn’t find funny since I wasn’t familiar with most of the shows and certainly none of the personalities being parodied.  I went to Greenwich Village to see “The Fantastiks” because I adored that musical, having seen a such sweet chamber production of it in Missoula, accompanied by two grand pianos (or one grand piano and a harp–anyway it had been beautiful) and ever after wanted to be a good enough soprano to sing the role of “Luisa”.  I believe I also saw “Le Cage Aux Folles” on Broadway that weekend. (“I Am What I Am” is a favorite song and I harbor a fondness for drag queens.  ”Pricilla Queen of the Desert” is one of my favorite films.)  Between the shows I walked around and ate bagels and slices of pizza.  My first bagel in New York was schmeared with an enormous amount of cream cheese and the man behind the counter said something to me that made me think he gave me extra for good luck on my first day in New York.  All the money I had went for theatre tickets.  No restaurant meals, no drinks.  I didn’t even know at that point in my life that I ought to buy food or wine or a gift for my host who I actually never saw after joining her for the one play.  She was so busy with classes and rehearsals.  She told me when she first came to New York she tried to live in Queens (where the rent was lower and the rooms were bigger) but it was just too far away.

If Queens was too far away from Broadway, how very much more difficult must it be to get there from Missoula, Montana.  Although both Kathy McNenny and JK Simmons succeeded.  They represented the only two ways I knew of to get to New York.  JK Simmons didn’t go to New York until after he had his Equity Card.  I knew this because his brother David was a friend of mine and his father was my freshman advisor at the University of Montana.  I also knew that his skills included the ability conduct an entire orchestra!  (He was very nice to me and invited me out for a drinks with the cast after I sent a note backstage, via an usher, letting him know someone from Missoula was in the audience, when I saw the touring production of the short-lived broadway musical “Doonesbury” in which he played a small part and understudied most of the others. –It was during same fall term of my political internship as that first trip to New York.)  The other way to get to New York, as I understood it was to get into a school, scholarship necessary.  Kathy McNenny was able to do this after first attending the University of Montana.  I remember other drama majors, eager to get on with their lives after college, talking about Kathy’s decision to go to Julliard where she would have to pay for another bachelors degree, instead of going to the Globe in San Diego which offered her a full-ride, an MFA and an Equity Card.  But it wasn’t in New York.

 Kathy knew what she was doing and I was not in the same league.  In high school she was a competitive swimmer with a near perfect GPA,  president of the Thespian Society, in the select show choir and involved in many other organizations that involved having her photo in the high school year book.  She taught swimming lessons and visited schools as Captain Power for the local utility, possibly the only paying costumed character gig in the entire region.  When she was a senior and I was a junior, she played the title role in our high school production of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”.  I played one of her pupils who grew from child to adult under her tutelage.  I was the only actress who did not have to bind for the first scene and had to stuff my bra for the last scene.  That pretty much says it all.

Sometimes I have dreams that are so clear and simple that when I wake up I am surprised that it didn’t really happen.  This morning I awoke after one such dream.

I was sitting in a booth in a dark dive bar in Williamsburg with friends looking at a 4-page color pull-out section of the newspaper about the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Clown College Reunion taking place across the river.  The feature contained a full page of yearbook-like rows of small portraits of families of clowns, parents and children in full makeup and costume.  I felt sad and left out because I clown alone without my family.

This much is true:  As the New York Clown Theatre Festival was taking place, there was also a reunion of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clowns hosted by Greg and Karen DeSanto in Baraboo, Wisconsin (Not Manhattan as in my dream).  Jay Stewart was involved in the organization of the event.  Jay is married to Kristen and they have 2 kids who perform with them sometimes.  There are other couples I know, or know of, mostly former Ringling Clowns, like Tommy and Tammy Parrish who worked together on the circus and went back to the real world after they had kids.  They still perform, and sometimes their kids join in the act. There is a part of me who would love to clown like that.

However, my life did not work out that way.  Although I did meet my husband working in a theatre and he has an acting resume, that’s was never really his thing.  He was a director and uses the skills he developed in that capacity in a management role in the real world. (So we have insurance–yeah!)  The Kid we produced together hid in my arms in the kitchen when there was a clown at a birthday party.  She was not at all happy when I paid attention to other children when I was a clown at her preschool’s annual fundraiser.  As a dance student she refused to perform and would not even put on the little tutu for a photo with classmates.

During the recent New York Clown Festival I went to events on my own.  I didn’t see as many performances as I had planned.  I didn’t see many performances at all.  The nights I was scheduled to be on stage involved so much planning and jumping through hoops in order for My Kid to be picked up from school and escorted to and picked up from Brownies and soccer.  She requires frequent feedings and regular bedtimes.  It is considered bad form for an 8-year-old to hang out with a bunch of clowns in a dive bar in Williamsburg on a school night.  There were other complications.  The Husband was away on a business trip for much of the festival.  Although I’d visualized many evenings of passing the ball of responsibility for My Kid to The Husband the moment he walked through the door, hopping on the G-train on Lafayette and hopping off at Metropolitan for an evening of cutting edge clown performances from all over the world– that I would be able to see FOR FREE with my participants badge–followed by career promoting beer, shop talk and networking at the Lazy Catfish. Ha!.  I saw one show on a night I did not perform.  It cost me over $50 for a babysitter.   As I was leaving, I passed Ishah Jansen-Faith on her way to the theatre. Hey are you coming back?  No way.  I would have had to pay the babysitter over $100 if I stayed for the free cabaret.

That’s why people put their kids in their acts.

I spend quite a while yesterday morning online researching Sarah Palin’s racism both overt and implied.  So this evening on the subway when My Kid asked me what color Obama was…

I immediately started going through the Rolodex of my mind searching for facts I could tell her about his white mother from Kansas and his black father from Kenya and how the met in Hawaii and how some people get divorced. Also some foolish people with light skin like Sarah Palin decide not to like people who have dark skin like the Obama family, and say words like “those people” to mean they don’t want to even try to be friends.  Even though they are grownups, they have not yet learned the lesson of “The Sneeches” by Dr. Seuss.

Stalling for time I asked; “What do you mean what color is Obama?”

She wanted to know if he was BLUE or RED!  

I remembered an essay I once read by someone, who, attending a gay wedding and reception at a church in Seattle,  wondered what carefully crafted words about love and relationships would be prepared for the child who was marveling at the weird thing he had seen.  That strange thing the child had never seen before turned out to be a rotary dial telephone.

Last night, My Kid was watching “The Wizards of Waverly Place” on the Disney Channel (where the characters are drawn with such a broad brush one has to do a double-take just to register that the show is live action and not a cartoon).  The main character and her friend had an encounter with the mean girl who ruled the local high school.  Her mission every day was to say things to individual students to make them cry, just because she could.  It gave her pleasure.  It’s a type and I was reminded of Sarah Palin.

Then, also, this morning, I by myself, also, in fact, was cruisin’ the internet, and also, then I found, on my own studyin’ an article by a reporter who wrote about terrible racist things that Sarah Palin has said:

http://www.laprogressive.com/2008/09/05/alaskans-speak-in-a-frightened-whisper-palin-is-“racist-sexist-vindictive-and-mean”/

I caught a few minutes of “The View” today.  Elisabeth Hasselbeck is one of the hosts.  She used to host “The Look For Less” on the Style Network.  It was a show about  shopping and makeovers for ordinary people on a budget, copying runway style in preparation for a special event.  I watched it a couple of times.  The outfits are adequate, but they are never as good as the original designer clothes.

Sarah Palin looked great last night.

I can do that.

 If I had a national televised debate tonight, I could be ready by show time.

 All I have to do to look as competent and professional as Sarah Palin is to go uptown to Bergdorf Goodman or Saks Fifth Avenue, buy an outfit and then go to an upscale salon and have my hair colored and styled.

I can do that anytime I want–I have a credit card!  (Oh crap, what if Wall Street crashes and we don’t bail out Hank Paulson, no credit, I won’t get my makeover…)

As for the policy questions..

That’s completely irrelevant.

 Dear American:I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

After college I left Montana to find work.  A year or two later I desperately wanted to return home but couldn’t find a job that covered rent.  While visiting my then boyfriend at his father’s home on Flathead Lake, we went out to a bar.  I was introduced to one of his father’s friends, one of those retiree transplants to a beautiful part of the state, (the county with the highest per capita income and the poorest record of passing school levies). He was the kind of person known in certain circles as “A Golfing Republican”.  He looked me straight in the eye and said “You have no problems here.”  

This was a year or so after the stock market crashed spectacularly just as naive newly minted college grads such as myself were entering the job market.  I remember overhearing one of my ambitious well-educated housemates sobbing on the phone;  ”so tired of watching the clock day after day” at her receptionist job and actually being told to her face that she must “be patient and wait 2 or 3 years” until the baby boomers ahead of her were promoted out of the jobs for which she was qualified.  Without the perspective of age and experience, I heard so much about the importance of being productive (a word that had never once been spoken in my presence as I pursued my liberal arts degree at a university) that I believed I was failing to the point that I would face a firing line and be executed for my crime of not being productive.

If Hank Paulson gets his money from Congress then Wall Street will be fine and the executives can retire to beautiful locations.  BUT THERE WILL BE PROBLEMS THERE.