I went running in the morning, just around the park, just for half an hour. But, by evening my hip hurt and after googling I think it is bursitis. That’s not who I think I am. That’s not how I move in the world.
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.