Clownmommy

After I picked up My Kid at school and she had played in the playground with her friends for a while, I had to take her into Manhattan because the timing of the childcare pass between me and The Husband did not allow for either taking her all the way home, and waiting for him to get there before I could leave for my commute or getting her all the way uptown to my husbands office in Midtown and back down to the studio in the East Village before the start of rehearsal at 6:30.  Fortunately The Husband was able to leave the office a few minutes early and we were able to do the switch in front of the building so she didn’t have to come up to the studio (especially since I had forgotten to bring her Ninetendo DS as promised.)  I wasn’t the only one.  One of the clowns was manouvering her stroller into the tiny retro-fitted elevator as I got on.  Already there another of the women clowns was settling her preschooler on a yoga mat with snacks and picture books and her ipod.  The babysitter had cancelled.  The other clown’s husband showed up in short order to collect his own toddler in a stroller before we had even started our warmups.  I think the other two mommy clowns were paying babysitters by the hour for the time they were at rehearsal in addition to the time it took to get to rehearsal.

A commentator on the radio said  that the financial meltdown probably would not have happened if there were more women in high places in the world of finance because women tend to be more adverse to risk than men.  The males took on too much risk.  Their actions would have been tempered if there had been more women’s voices in the mix.

Apparently high testosterone levels are tied to high profits and when men had higher levels of testosterone they made riskier trades for higher profits.

Women approach risk differently.  They make less risky choices and choose safer positions.

Women outnumber men in the workforce for the first time in history.  But, the higher you go the fewer women you find.

It’s that whole harder for women than men to juggle  the personal and professional particularly when there are children.

Some formerly male professions have become dominated by women for example veterinary medicine (Mattel certainly saw that coming with glamour vet Barbie.)

Clowning is a performance form traditionally dominated by men.  There are certain expectations and structures.  ”A man in a dress, funny, a woman in pants, not so funny”   Testosterone based gag development;  build, build, build, blowoff.  Estrogen based gag development:  circle around something getting closer and closer to the emotional charge.  Hmmm.

Kendall is working in the studio with a dozen women in less linear development of pieces, working together to develop a women’s style.

What will we come up with???

I am off until the next rehearsal on Wednesday at 6:30.  –Yeah right!

There is laundry to do and groceries to buy and meals to cook and rooms to clean and homework to supervise and bedtimes to enforce…

rehearsal

better

managed to get some laughs during an improv.

improv exercise to do a gory fairy tale death

I’m not the only one who has trouble.  One woman acted out a nursery rhyme when the assignment was to act out a fairy tale.  Buzzzzzzz.  Wrong.

Kendall wanted people to talk about process after, I did but then I felt like I’d said too much and that it was a mistake to have said that I used to feel more relaxed when I thought this was Kendalls thing and she just chose things and put them on stage.

Zombie bodies coming out of the wolf’s belly when the woodsman rescues the already eaten Little Red Riding Hood and Gramdmother was my improvisation success today.

This morning The Husband and I attempted to have nice restaurant breakfast but we were both so stressed out about our work neither of us could eat much.  He spent the whole time on his crackberry because of some problem at work and I was so nervous about rehearsal because I was so unsucessful in my improvs on Wednesday (which I now realize was partly because of all the build up and stress over the first day of school and we need to have a nice dinner and talk and decompress after the first day of school and we didn’t get to do that because I had to take My Kid to my rehearsal at 6:30 and then The Husband took much longer getting to the studio to pick her up because he got hung up at work).

My Kid ran out of the studio full of women clowns so fast when she saw her daddy.

The Husband said My Kid didn’t fall asleep until 11:00.  Yikes!

My puppeteer friend met me in the East Village after rehearsal and we had drinks at The Cloisters and then ate perogis and borscht at Veselka.  Poor puppeteer friend she had to listen to me complain about my creative block and encourage me to believe that I am really funny.

So stressed.

Yeah!   My CC Puppet friend is here.  She’s got some work and some interviews and so she’s in town.  She’s between jobs and cities again.  I am suddenly aware of how much I haven’t changed since last we were together.

Tomorrow is the First Day of School.  Finally My Kid is asleep.  She has been preparing, making and going over her lists of things to put in her backpack and things to do in the morning, including but not limited to eating breakfast, going to school and finding her classroom and new teacher.

It’s a big deal.

I was watching My Kid all in pink on her pink Ripstick with pink knee, elbow and wrist pads.  As I watched I rethought the clothing items I packed earlier in the day to take to rehearsal tomorrow.  I’m rethinking the black and grey silk clothes that are what I consider to be “better” clothes.  They were each purchased and worn to family events, a wedding and a funeral.  So they are “good clothes”.  And I guess I’m not sure I want to wear them as a clown.  They are of my “real life”.  

So I think I have to start over coming up with something to wear at rehearsal tomorrow.  I like the fluttery.  I like the  silhouette of a long skirt.  But, I don’t have anything to wear.

Tomorrow is the first day of school.

Tomorrow I have rehearsal.

First I made sure I knew what My Kid intends to wear on the First Day of School and that it is something that is clean and exists in the apartment. 

Then, I ransacked my closet looking for something for me to wear as a clown in the studio tomorrow. The clothes we wear in Clowns Ex Machina are not dropped in our laps during tech week by some costumer we haven’s seen since having our measurements taken right after being cast (as is the case in traditional theatre).  We develop our own costumes in the course of the rehearsal process and at the moment I have none.

It is a source of stress.

We are re-working Clown Axioms which had its first incarnation at the undergroundzero festival last summer.  I came in at the end of the process at the end of the studio time and the beginning of tech.  I was assigned to wear all black and move across the stage during transitions.

As a result, while the other women are trying to remember what they did in their pieces, I am starting that process from scratch.

I have no idea what to wear.  We’re riffing off of fairy tales and gothic romances and so on the first day of rehearsal I put together a skirt and corset affair.  But, several of the other women are already wearing that sort of thing so it’s a no go.  For the second rehearsal I wore a cotton Indian tunic, pants and sari outfit, given to me by friends from India.  I wore it to a workshop this winter and enjoyed the color and ease of movement.  But, when I brought it in for this particular show, Kendall said it didn’t work because it’s from a different time and place than the others.

So, I am back to square one.

I have returned to the pictures we were given as inspiration.   In among the wenches in corsets and full skirts, there are also fluttery gowns and flowing hair.  So I have found something else to try.  It’s fluttery but it’s dark, grey and black instead of virginal white.  We’ll see.

I’m thinking about fall and the first day of school.

My Kid’s first day of 4th grade. I started at a new school in a new town in a new state when I was in 4th grade. I remember that time so well and I am a little bit, no, actually a lot shocked that my baby girl is already that old.

9/11 was to be the first day of playgroup for My Kid and I when she was a toddler and we had just moved to New York and I was looking forward to meeting other mothers in the neighborhood.

Katrina happened right before My Kid started kindergarten and since I couldn’t watch the news while she was around I stayed up until 3:00 or 4:00 even 5:00 am several nights in a row. I couldn’t stop watching and being shocked and depressed by the news. Later that school year, I was assigned to the jury of a murder trial that lasted two months.

Last fall, The Husband was in the middle of changing jobs when the economy tanked.

What is the opposite of auspicious?

I sent it as an attached document. I received an email telling me there was no attachment… And we do it AGAIN! and again… and again… and again…

I hate to criticize another mother’s decision making skills…

I know it’s just a cartoon and plot devices are needed so the kids can have their epic adventure. But my goodness! This is what Sosuke’s mother, Lisa, does: When her husband doesn’t come home from his job as a boat captain on the day she expects, she drinks beer and falls asleep on her kid’s bed. In the middle of a storm so fierce electricity goes out and people are predicting a tsunami, she decides to put her kid in the car and go home through the driving rain, through flooding streets and up a narrow mountain road. Then, in the middle of the night while that same storm continues to rage, she decides that what she really wants to do is leave her five-year-old son, and someone else’s preschool size child (who just appeared in her yard during the storm), alone in her neighborless house on top of a cliff while she drives several miles back to the senior center where she works.