Clownmommy

There is something about Brooklyn.  My life was never like this anywhere else I’ve ever lived.  I make a plan for my day, a simple ordinary plan such as I’ll take My Kid to school and then I’ll come home and do some cleaning and some laundry.     But, that’s not what happened.  Instead and old friend, one of the first mommies I met when I moved to New York, is in town with her kids.  They were at my daughter’s school and after the 4th grade publishing party we went and got coffee and walked and talked or sat and talked while her kids played in the park (because, unlike My Kid, they’re already on vacation).  They used to live here, just a couple blocks away and now they live in Uganda.

I’ve never known anyone who lived in Uganda before.  But, my friend said “Oh soon you will.  There is a huge ex-pat community in Uganda.  There are the people who work for the UN and NGO’s and then there are lots of people from places like Poland who have just moved there to see what kind of work and life they can make.”

So then I come home and I turn on my laptop and I check a clown site or  two and I click on a link from another website to John Towsen’s website, that’s John Towsen of the book CLOWNS. Well guess what his website says!  It says he’s not had time to update it much because he’s been working in Kampala, Uganda!  Hey!  That’s where my mommy friend from Fort Greene, Brooklyn lives now!

It’s going to close on Sunday and I haven’t seen it yet and I want to see it because it’s about clowns and it’s directed by David Shiner who I really admire.  I really will try.  Michael Bongar twittered that Joel Jeske will be playing Smelky at the Wednesday Matinee, but I won’t be able to get there for that.   It’s the last week of school and there are so many activities and the husband has a busy work week with evening commitments and I’m going to Philly for the day on Thursday.

Tomorrow there is a publishing party in My Kid’s classroom.  Wednesday is the 4th grade Field Day.  Friday (which is also my last Pilates reformer class) there is a Girl Scout badge ceremony.

Today is Monday.  Monday is over.

Some of the playground moms are going to try to see a Sex and the City 2 (even though we’ve heard it’s bad we still want to see it) matinee before school is over.

I have to make cupcakes for the “summer birthday’s party” and there is the last “Publishing Party” and Field Day and I have my last fitness classes before I get My Kid back and can’t go to the gym by myself anymore.

Jef Johnson and Kendall Cornell will both be teaching workshops in New York this summer.

I just got a save the dates e-mail.  Jef has been studying the mind-body connection and so have I.  I became interested in this aspect of the creative process after I got blocked last fall and was able to trace my difficulties to a few moments of seemingly innocuous conversation that became the touchstone for my work on that particular project.  Since then I have done some body work and have been reading more about Buddhist meditation and thinking of the concept of “being” as it relates to clown work.

There is something exciting and charming about beautiful girl children playing soccer and I am so glad that My Kid plays (but not so glad that I’m willing to twist my life around and buy a car so that My Kid can be on a travel team).

My Kid was on a great team this season with a great coach, and after the parents talked the girls out of calling themselves “The Cheeseballs” we were happy to spend our weekends cheering on the “Orange Devils”

And in the culture of “a trophy for every child”, I as a parent am really enjoying My Kid’s newest trophy which seems to be decorated with a statue of “Janet” from the TV show of my own childhood called Three’s Company!

As if to illustrate how the members of Clowns Ex Machina have the same goals for the troupe but come to the work from very different places; another clown mommy I were talking about our children as we rode the train back to Brooklyn last night after the meeting with the MBA arts consultant about what we would like to do from this point forward in order to take the work to the next level.

We, as their mothers, are obsessed with our girls and lock onto whatever is happening in their development in that way that bores non-parents but is endlessly fascinating to those of us in the trenches.

This other mommy is in the throes of potty training her two-year-old.  It was going so well she had been fooled into thinking she had accomplished this milestone but this week there has been a backslide.  Classic three steps forward two steps back.  It was the central thread of the conversation all the way from Penn Station to Brooklyn Heights.  Then it was my turn to obsess about public schools from the Clark Street to Atlantic Center.  I’m preparing for the middle school application process and the mother of the toddler has been talking to friends who have targeted their volunteer efforts in such a way to gain access for their child to exclusive preschool programs with the intention of positioning them for private school scholarships.  And my clown mommy friend, the one who is so deeply into potty training that she can hardly speak of anything else comes up for air to inhale the public vs private school debate and imagines she would like to home school at the same time as she is increasing her hours of work.

What can we do?  There is only so much we can do and only so many things we can worry about at  one time.

The concerns of parents are rarely taken into consideration in the corporate world.  But, the posturing while wearing appropriate business attire, presenting long term plans, and brainstorming meetings typical of the white collar professional class seem like so much choreographed theatre to those whose days are measured in toddler tantrums and vulnerable to the seismic life-shift of pregnancy.

Hmmmm.  There might be a clown piece here.

One of the things that came up in the meeting with the business consultant today was how all of the clowns present would like to work more.  We would like to perform more often or for longer runs.  We just want to do it more.   As the others were talking about how it feels to get all excited and put on a show and then it’s over and many months go by before we gear up for another show the image of a hole in the sand came into my mind.

All of us work at other things and several of us are mothers.

In order to make ourselves available for the rehearsal process we dig holes in our daily lives to make room for rehearsals and performances and other aspects of the production.  When the show is over we stop digging and the hole we made to hold the show fills up immediately just as a hole at the beach fills with water or sand when the tide comes in.

I think we are looking for a reason to stay on the beach and keep digging.

We can also come to terms with starting over, each new day, each new season.

Tonight, after My Kid has her swimming lesson and I pass her on to The Husband I’ll get to attend one of the HP events in the West Village.  It’s an event for blogging mommies where we get to “see new HP products designed to make moms’ busy lives more convenient with easy to use features for the whole family.”

Now why is it whenever there is a product for moms it has “features for the whole family”?

I was alone in the apartment, reading an article my mother sent me from my home town newspaper about the eighth grade graduation celebration of the only student attending Salmon Prairie School this year in Condon, Montana.  The sound of the phone ringing broke me out my reverie.  I  was in the middle of imagining the daily walk of the single teacher and only student beneath the pine trees next to the Swan River at the foot of the Mission Mountain Range.  They walk together every day, stopping now and then to collect plants for science experiments or sit down to read or take out their watercolors to paint what they see.  In the winter they use snowshoes.

The rapid-fire voice on the other end of phone was a representative of the Brooklyn middle school I had called about visiting because my 9-year-old thinks she wants to go there.  The mothers-who-know on the playground advise visiting the schools in the spring of your child’s 4th grade year so that in the fall of the 5th grade year you will be in the position to allow your child to visit and apply to only those schools that you, as a parent, are willing to let her attend—taking into consideration, not only the teachers, student body and academic focus of the school, but also the length of the daily commute by public transportation and wether or not the students are allowed to leave the school property to wander the neighborhood bodegas and fast food emporiums at lunch time.

The woman on the other end of the phone introduced herself and launched into an explanation of how the tours were only in September, October and November and she didn’t know why they were still listed where ever I had seen them and the guidance counselor at my daughter’s elementary school would post that information for the parents next fall, good-bye.

The contrast was so startling.   I don’t even have the energy for my usual rant about how the middle school choice process in New York City is so ridiculous it boarders on cruelty.

Puppeteer Clown had some work in the city this weekend.  So we had a chance to visit and talk about the possibility of finding time this summer to get together to work on our show.   August sounds good.