After my Pilates mat class I had extra time at the Y thanks to the other mom who took the girls to their ballet at Mark Morris. I took extra long in the steam room and thought about some clown stuff. I was going to swim laps but forgot my goggles so I walked down 6th Avenue into Greenwich Village. I bought a latte at Joe’s on Waverly but there weren’t any open seats so I kept walking and ended up at Unoppressive Non-Imperialist Bargan Books on Carmine Street where I bought essays by Virginia Woolfe and books about Tracy Ullman and Spike Mulligan with the intention of learning more about the creative processes of others. Tracy Takes On was interesting to me because I am doing a costume based character at the next Downtown Clown and I picked up The Unpublished Spike Milligan Box 18 because of all the photographs of all the scraps of ideas that the British comedian kept in his own unique filing system that he used to develop material:
Box 18 – Ideas. This contained Spikes notes. He would scribble a poem and put it in this file. Sometimes it would be incomplete and he would work on it perhaps a week or a month later, or it would be ‘chucked’. The file contained ideas for speeches, stories or sketches for one of his television programmes… When he decided to work on any one of his ideas he would sit at the typewriter and the writing simply flowed. –Norma Farnes
I would have enjoyed going to Clownlab this weekend but it got cancelled like everything else because of the snow.
It’s hard to believe Friday was a snow day today was so sunny and bright. Spring is definitely here! …unless it snows again.