This week at the New York Clown Theater Festival I saw Channel One. It made me think of the first couple of shows I did at Annex where the excitement and energy backstage and after the show was just as intense as what happened on stage, under the lights, in front of the audience. At 30, all hair and silver shorts, Emily and Ishah are single in the city and the possibility that someone seeing the show may give them a job or become their next romantic partner is a built in thrill for the performers that was understandably absent from Carmen the Mopera. Julie Goell, a seasoned professional with years of theater and mask work under her belt, has also spent more years than Ishah and Emily have been old enough to drink in bars, raising a family and playing second fiddle to her husband’s more prominent performing career. I recognize a kindred spirit. Her son was a little older than my daughter is now, when I first met her at Celebration Barn over 10 years ago. At that time I saw an exerpt from her show about a maid performing the opera Carmen using found objects as puppets and I loved it. Last nights performance seemed have the energy of a woman competently checking off task after task on a to-do list. Of course that interpretation of the piece is highly colored by my experience earlier in the day when I went out for lunch and to see the film Catfish with another mommy friend from my neighborhood. We talked about how hard it is to keep the home clean and get the kids to all their games, and finding babysitters so we can attend curriculum night, and the middle school search… I’ve just become class parent and my friend spoke of how she should have paced herself. She said she was such an active parent right out of the gate when her first child started elementary school that she burnt out. Now the teachers of her third child who is left at early drop-off and picked up from the after-school program don’t even know what the mother looks like. And then there was that film in which I was struck most by the physical difference between the young entitled Manhattan artists and the wearying daily realities of a worn down middle American mom.
Last fall over tea at a Pan Quotiden, after a Clown Axioms performance, Ishah asked me if I liked being a mom, “Because sometimes you look like you don’t like it.”
That’s because she always sees me when I am in the middle of getting to rehearsal or rushing out of rehearsal; worrying about childcare and how long will I be away and what will I miss and who will be there to take care of it and oh yeah here I am supposed to be a funny clown but need to look at my notes to remember who I am–out of context without my child.
For the last several years, as I have tried to work out some kind of artistic career, I have struggled with the physical transition between the roles of watchful, unseen mother and focus drawing performer. I love being a mom and I love being on stage but the extra distance that I must travel from one to the other and back again (compared to when I was young and single) is an exhausting albeit worthwhile detour.