Adam – Clownmommy

A bit of a clown Friday

Adam’s all gaga over his baby he wasn’t there. Well I wasn’t there either. But, we checked the box office at “Humor Abuse” to see if there were tickets. (Tonight’s show was sold out but we have tickets for tomorrow night.) We got to see lots of clowns I know in front of the theatre. Jay Stewart was there in town for the weekend, and Lisa Lewis with her husband (Their kid chose not to accompany her clown parents to someone else’s clown show when there was an opportunity to play with a Wii.) Michael Bongar was there with his wife. There were others I knew. It’s the last weekend of Larry Pisoni’s kid’s solo show about growing up with a clown for a dad.

It was a clown day for me. After I got My Kid successfully to her daily spring break swimming lesson at the Y (notice how I haven’t had any Pilates classes or lap swims this week…), transfered her care and feeding to The Husband who was taking a long childcare related lunch, I got to spend a couple of hours playing in the studio with Kendall and the other clown women. It was good to do. It’s been a while.

Then uptown on the train with My Kid and The Husband, returning him to his office and accompanying my kid to FAO Schwartz for the last afternoon of the last Friday of her Spring Vacation. She spent an hour hanging around the adoptable baby dolls, so I was softened up and let her paint a penguin in the new ceramic painting section of the toy store. I did one too to keep myself from getting bored. I hope I will have the courage to throw it away as I am trying to clear clutter. It was like buying a sandwich to sit in a cafe because your feet hurt even though you aren’t hungry.

After we didn’t get into the play we went and had a lovely end of the week family dinner at Trattorio Spaggetto in the West Village. It’s not the best Italian food in the city, but it’s the best location between a church and a public fountain.

I had hope of going out and talking with clowns tonight (Jef Johnson is also performing this evening) but after wine and heavy food with My Kid and The Husband, I find myself home in the apartment typing up a quick blog entry while My Kid watches some “SpongeBob SquarePants” before the entire weekend becomes about My Kid and the AYSO Spring Soccer Season which begins for our family tomorrow!!!!!!

a quarter to 3

So I’m up in the middle of the night and googling the other performers who I will meet at the clown theatre festival and I look up clownlink, which I haven’t read in a while and Adam mentioned my blog and how it petered out just when I got to the part about him, so I looked it up and… I did click publish before I sent it. Whoops! Didn’t mean to do that. But, I remember I did want to make the effort to post something during that show’s three day run. There is more to the story. But I’m not going to write it now! it’s a quarter to 3 in the morning. Of course I would get caught and called out publicly for making a blogging mistake. How very clown of me.

Exploring the Bozo Mystique…on…Feminine Terms

The show opened last night. The house was small (due in part to the fact that the “undergroundzero” festival of experimental theatre, was moved to the Manhattan Children’s Theatre from Collective:Unconscious space after a sewage leak forced the theater to close.) Kendall said she was told there would be signs and a live person in front of Collective:Unconscious sending audience around the block and across the street to the new location. But, there wasn’t. There were some advance sales who did not show.

Anyway the show went well. Not genius, but for the first time in front of an audience it was great. Some things, like Ginny’s Cinderella piece which needed an audience volunteer really clicked. It’s always scary to put a clown show in front of a real audience for the first time because contact with the audience is so important. More so than in scripted theatre, the performance changes with every audience. (This thought makes me nervous about the one shot I get to be on stage at the New York Clown Theatre Festival in September.)

At a bar after the show Kendall revealed that she had been contacted by someone from a high profile comedy show, after the New York Times article came out on Tuesday. Such things are taken with a grain of salt. Sometimes it’s just an assistant trolling for material, even when they don’t know what you do. A friend of mine started the Chad Everett fan club at her college to see if the student government would give them money. The student government funded the club and it and it was written up in the papers. She was contacted and invited to be on the David Letterman show. She assumed they knew it was a stunt since they’d found her through the newspaper. She was flown to New York and got as far as the green room before anyone actually read the articles close enough to realize she was in on the joke and her appearance was cancelled.

Kendall was very interested in what her friends had to say after the show, which images stuck with them and what they found funny or fascinating. It’s hard to tell in a rehearsal process. Something is cool, and then you rehearse it and watch it over and over, everyone in the studio has seen it so nobody’s laughing anymore and you don’t remember why it’s in the show. Then you put it in front of an audience and they are surprised and they laugh and you remember, oh yeah that was a good idea.

It’s weird that we have such a big article (half a page!!!) about our company in advance of a short work-in-progress at small festival. But, as Kendall said, you can’t control when somebody from the New York Times wants to write a story and you take the attention when you can get it.

It was pretty obvious to me that a man wrote the headline over the story by April Dembosky. What woman would write; “Exploring the Bozo Mystique, and Defining Funny on Their Own Feminine Terms’.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/nyregion/29clowns.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Adam Gertsacov posted the article on his site, clownlink.com
Speaking of Adam, and Kendall and women in clowning…

Adam and I were in the same workshop at Studio Kaple in Nectiny Czechoslovakia (some years ago, it was actually about 4 months before Czechoslovakia turned into Slovakia and the Czech Republic. We had a heated discussion one evening, other people were included, but Adam