Funundrum–what a strange title.

I could tell by the poster that the publicity machine had gone into action before the show had a headline act.

And, the show didn’t have a headline act.

co·nun·drum  n.

I recommend going ahead of time to pick up any tickets for an event at Madison Square Garden.  The WILL CALL set up is a mess and I have seen families come into their seats 45 minutes after the show started because it takes so long to wait in line to pick up tickets and then another long time to wait for bags to be searched and another long time after the tickets have been scanned and still more time to go up all the stairs and through the concrete corridors before arriving in the right section.

I hate Madison Square Garden.

After the show the escalators are always turned off.  It feels like a fire drill.  It makes me think of–what if a fire.

I am uneasy in that building.

I wish the old Penn Station, the beautiful one I never saw, had never been torn down in the name of Urban Renewal.

But we go to see the circus every year.

Oh well.

I hate Madison Square Garden! It’s an ugly inefficient maze of a construction made all the more tragic because the old Pennsylvania Train Station was torn down to build it. I never saw it, but I’ve seen pictures and read descriptions of it being even more grand and beautiful than Grand Central Station.

Anyway, Zing Zang Zoom was better than we expected from the poster which said to me (as an experienced circus goer): “Yikes, we left Winter Quarters without a headline act.”

I had pithy thoughts of circuses and life–but they are gone, victims of the Easter/lice chaos.

I watched energetic young clown Joy Powers and missed my physical youth as I willingly paid way too much for cotton candy, a plush elephant named “Asia” and a plastic pony shaped beer stein filled with ice and sugar syrup for my own little force of nature.

I never saw the Pickle Family Circus, but we watched videos with reverence at Clown College because that was where Bill Irwin (the clown who became a MacArthur Fellow had gone to develop his own style with Larry Pisoni and Geoff Hoyle after graduating from the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Clown College (and Oberlin). But, I remember the black and white photograph of Larry Pisoni with his son in identical clown costumes. As a novice clown struggling to master basic juggling in a few short weeks, growing up with circus parents seemed like a much easier way to go.

Apparently not.

According to the show “Humor Abuse” learning to be a clown from a father who is a professional clown didn’t sound that much different from growing up with a football coach for a father. Same type of obsession just practicing different skills. I’m thinking sports analogies because yesterday afternoon before seeing Lorenzo Pisoni’s show and this morning after the performance, I escorted My Kid to her first and second AYSO soccer games of the season. As an eight-year-old she is unable to participate in league soccer unless her parents are also willing to participate on a game by game basis.

I think about the similarities between playing fields and circus rings. I didn’t play team sports as a child and didn’t find that kind of focus until I began to perform with the Missoula Children’s Theatre under the direction of Jim Caron, at about the same time that Lorenzo. Pisoni was working with his father. The two organizations had the same do-it-yourself aesthetic of the 1970′s that grew out of the cooperative ideals of the 1960′s and shaped the lives of those who came of age in the 1980′s.

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 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.