elementary school – Clownmommy

Wednesday Matinee

So I took myself to see a matinee on Broadway, something I think I can do just any old time because I live in New York, but of course I can’t because I do my day to day living in New York.

So, since this was likely to be my last free Wednesday afternoon, because now that the Citywide FIRST Lego League Championship is over, that particular after school program will go down to once a week and that once a week is most likely to be Thursday. This was my daughters 3rd year on her elementary school’s FLL team. Every year I tell myself; after tourist season I will take myself on up to Times Square of a Wednesday afternoon and get myself a half-price ticket to a Broadway show. Every year I put it off week after week until I realize that this may be my very last Wednesday chance and then I do it, just the once. Even at half price the tickets are expensive and even if it’s just one afternoon there are lots of other things I could or should do with my Wednesday afternoons.

Last year, on my last “free” Wednesday afternoon, after meeting my husband for lunch in mid-town I took myself the two blocks to Times Square and got a ticket to the play Angela Lansbury was in at a theatre so close it could be seen from TKTS booth which was an important consideration, since it was already 1:55 pm. This year I did essentially the same thing, again choosing the show with Angela Lansbury in it; A Little Night Music also starring Catherine Zeta-Jones. Leigh Ann Larkin (who played “Dainty June” in Gypsy) was also in it. She go to sing “The Miller’s Son”. Her “Petra” was a continuation of the same story of the young woman she played in Gypsy, who must acquiesce like a child in her day to day work, as a Vaudeville performer or as a ladies maid, when she is in reality a woman of passion and substance. That could be an interesting piece…

Several of the singers had colds. So does everyone else in New York City. I still enjoyed their performances.

But, what I really left the theatre with was Stephen Sondheim’s music and the story. I don’t know how much of what I saw and continue to think about was Sondheim and how much was the original inspiration for the musical, Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night. (I’ll put it into my Netflix queue and find out.)

So…

Cirque du Soleil’s Banana Shpeel has again delayed its first performance at New York’s Beacon Theatre. The new vaudeville show, which had already postponed its start date from February 25 to March 17, will now begin performances on April 29. In the bar after the New York Downtown Clown Revue on Monday night, I was talking to another clown who was saying there had been a big audition for the show recently. The new opening night is six weeks away, that’s a whole rehearsal process. I wonder if they are starting over from scratch. I wonder if (as opposed to Bergman and Sondheim) they put the cart before the horse and tried to put up a show before they had a story.

Mortality

Via facebook I learn of the death of an elementary school classmate.

Five days older than me, she will never be the age I am now.

The Husband, My Kid and I took the train to Union Square and bought books at Strand.

We ate guacamole and drank margaritas at the Mexican restaurant where the plastic men dive from the wall.

They went back to Brooklyn and I went to the Krane Theatre to see the New York Downtown Clown Revue.

Afterwards Phoebe’s Bar was the place to be.

One will go to Las Vegas to work for Cirque du Soleil. Another will teach a class. A third has his arm in a sling.

There is only one more Downtown Clown Revue left.

de-stressing over coffee

The morning was a little crazy. If the routine is interrupted, and it was (by printing the marketing letters for Clowns Ex Machina which I thought would happen last night, but we got home at 10:00 pm after eating out as a family immediately after curriculum night and the middle school informational meeting and My Kid had a meltdown so we had to regroup and settle and that was it the day was over–it just wasn’t possible to do secretarial work) things get forgotten. My Kids lunch didn’t make it to school this morning because although I made it–I didn’t hang it on the front door knob which means neither myself, The Husband, nor My Kid saw it. When we got to school we realized it was still on the counter. Aghhh!

After drop-off The Husband and I made time for a quick coffee date to reconnect and talk.

Last night was curriculum night at My Kid’s school. 4th grade is the hardest year of elementary school because of the stupid standardized tests. Three days of math followed by three days of “English Language Arts”. That’s SIX DAYS! College finals week is only a week. A week is only FIVE DAYS. This seems unnecessarily cruel. AND the results of the tests affect their middle school placement. This is insane!

I’ll post the letters for Clowns Ex Machina on the way back to school. I have to be there by 12:30 to chaperone the field trip. It will be such a relief to get rid of the letters. Data-merge computer tasks make me so tense my eating and sleeping are affected.

I had planned to do laundry today, but because I use a laundromat I need at minimum a 3-hour block of time and as it turns out I’m home for less than two hours.

What was it I was supposed to do?

Oh yeah, I remember now. I’ve got to fax the writers agreement I signed last week, upload a writer bio and compose a post for a syndicated mommy blog. So glad I don’t work.

Kid’s Clowns

The New York Downtown Clown Revue, a monthly late night venue for edgy stage clowns, produced and early evening show for children. So I took My Kid and a Classmate Neighbor Boy to see the fun.

As familiar as My Kid is with the clown genre, she and the boy-she’s-known-since-they-were-in-diapers-but-who-is-not-a-friend-because-he-is-a-boy chose seats for us in the very back row right under the light booth from which there was no chance of getting squirted with water, hit with a pie or being pulled onto the stage. Other peoples children chose to sit right on stage at the feet of the performers.

Joel Jeske and Christopher Lueck opened the show as a couple of brothers releasing the pent-up energy of patter clowns born to play three shows a day six days a week but they can’t because Vaudeville is dead.

Silly Billy, who was My Kid’s favorite clown last year, failed to impress this time with his kazoo and color changing scarf magic. But then, My Kid and that-boy-she-was-sitting-next-to are in fourth grade this year, an upper grade in elementary school. They have experience and standards. On the way home, My Kid told me that as a 4th grader she knows the difference between real magic and fake magic.

Lulu the clown, aka Juliette Jeske, introduced as a woman who will perform anywhere for money, appeared in a tailored jacket, crinoline skirt and stripped tights. Her suitcase of props was set up on a stand covered with a handmade quilt demonstrating the Midwestern crafty aspect of the American children’s party clown style. She works A LOT, much of it costumed character work at corporate events. She also writes and produces short films for the internet, hosts variety and burlesque shows and wrote and performed the stage show Princess Sunshine’s Bitter Pill of Truth Funhouse. Her performance was filled with the kind of visual puns, like a banana phone, that are popular with the preschool and kindergarten demographic.

Rounding out the evening were “Bucky and Gigi”, Chris Allison and his wife Gina, longtime Ringling circus clowns, she’s also a dancer. They wore bright neat costumes. We watched him get panned as “Coney Island Chris” on America’s Got Talent. But, with a red nose on, he is as appealing as a cartoon character like SpongeBob SquarePants. It was a goal at clown college to become a human cartoon. Normal was called “pedestrian,” something to be avoided at all costs.

My kids didn’t seem impressed, but they were inspired. On the way to the subway they sang; “My Little Pony. She’s thin and boney. She went to the circus and farted on purpose.”

And then on the train, The Neighbor Boy demonstrated a perfect three point prat-fall. Hanging from the hand rail he: 1) dropped to the seat on his knees, 2) fell forward onto his face, then 3) rolled off the seat onto the floor and jumped up smiling!

Ta Da!!!

housekeeping or clowning/housekeeping and clowning?

I didn’t leave the apartment yesterday until 2:30 when I went to pick up My Kid from school. My day is over before everyone at the office has even returned from lunch.
As is my wont, I told myself I was going to go to the gym, but first I would do a few things in the apartment… clean the bathroom… and the kitchen… (It’s not a real kitchen, it’s a galley kitchen, a row of appliances along one wall of the living room.) I filled 3 bags of dirty laundry, one of towels, one of darks and one of lights. I will take them to the laundromat and pay to have them done. That’s what I do in my city life without a washing machine of my own (which keeps me from multitasking: making dinner, keeping an eye on the kids and having a load of clothes in the washing machine all at the same time the way my mother did. In my city life these three tasks do not take place in the same location. The playground, the laundromat and the kitchen are not even on the same block. I pay to have towels and socks and jeans and playclothes done by the ladies who wash other peoples clothes at the laundromat. I wash anything special and brightly colored or that needs to be taken out of the dryer while still damp, like anything with spandex in it. It takes at least 2 consecutive hours at the laundromat (and that’s only if I can go in the middle of the day at an uncrowded time and fill several machines at once, plus packing and pushing the laundry cart there (down and up two flights of brownstone stairs) and putting the clothes away, or hanging them to finish drying over the shower rod or on the wooden laundry rack. It’s all so Victorian. The dress shirts my husband wears to work are also done professionally, even though I kind of enjoy the repetitive accomplishment of ironing shirts. When we first moved here with our toddling baby, setting up an ironing board in the middle of the traffic pattern of busy room was a terrible idea. But, there was no out-of-the-way place for it. It got put into the back of closet never to be seen again (I’m not the only one, when My Kid started pre-school, there was a wooden ironing board in the “housekeeping” section of the classroom and I heard three different 3-year-olds ask “What’s that”, mine included.) until it was taken out and put on the street. We still have an iron, but it’s so high up in the back of the closet that I only get in down for special projects. I might climb up and get it down this week to iron the Girl Scout patches onto My Kids Brownie sash.
There are so many little things that are complicated for me that were not a big deal at all for my mother. For example, I am thinking of taking a pair of my daughters pants to the tailor just because the waistband needs a little piece of elastic sewn into the back of the waistband that is too loose. I can do that. I should do that. They’re not even nice pants, practically sweats that I got on sale, but she can’t wear them at all if they feel like they are going to fall off. I do not have a sewing machine and even if I did it’s not a big enough job to get out the sewing machine and setting it up and putting it away after. My mothers sewing machine was always set up on it’s own table just outside the laundry room in the basement. Little fixes like that could be taken care of “in a jiffy”.
Before I knew it my day was over and was time to walk to the subway and get on the train to go pick up My Kid at her elementary school and stand and chat with the other mothers and babysitters for an hour while the kids jump and run in the playground. Then we stopped at Target on the way home which often happens when we take the 2/3 train to Fort Greene from Brooklyn Heights instead of the C train to Lafayette. I hadn’t exercised, or written, or anything from my “creative clowning career” to do list.
This morning there were e-mails in my box from friends who have performances in Manhattan next week, and an update from Anna Zastrow who is spending a couple of months clowning in Cambodia.
Sigh…
I do have a sweet husband and a beautiful child.

The New Western Energy Show Redux

Last year My Kid joined her elementary school’s robotics team. They spent the year trying to solve alternative energy challenges using Lego’s.

As a child, I too learned about renewable sources of alternative energy –off the back of a truck:

This week, My Kid came home with a letter from her First LEGO League coach about their mission for 2008

The Project:

1.) Research how climate affects your own community. Identify a climate problem in your area, analyze climate data about the problem, and discover what your community is doing about it. Find another community somewhere in the world with the same issue and identify any solutions they are working on. Discuss the various ways climate impacts your community and your lives. Look at climate data available for your area as it relates to your climate problem. Consider talking with experts who work with or in climate everyday, like climatologists, farmers, foresters, and community leaders. Then find another community in a different geographical area that is experiencing a similar problem.

2.) Create an innovative solution based on the information you gathered that could be used on a local or even global level to solve this climate problem or improve on an existing solution. Consider all the potential solutions to your climate problem and how great an impact you can have. Talk with experts to see what solutions are already being developed or used. Build your climate connections by creating an innovative solution to your chosen climate problem that could be applied in both communities and could be adopted by even more communities who face a similar issue.

3.) Once you have researched and developed your solution, get out there and share it! Take what you’ve learned to build awareness of the problem and promote your solution. Show your research and solution and use this project to see just how great an impact you can have on your community and your world!

That’s a lot to ask of elementary school students. And yet it is the same thing they asked of us when I was in grade school. Our teachers, and TV, told us that the adults who built the factories with smokestacks that filled the air with acid rain causing pollution, and poured the sludge into the rivers that killed the fish, and the birds that ate the fish, were ignorant. They didn’t know that would happen.

So Woodsy Owl told us kids that the clean up was our job!

This year My Kid’s multidisciplinary curriculum is based around the theme of community, both local and global. The children are taught the same thing they learned watching High School Musical; “We’re all in this together”. In the spring there will be a large art project utilizing recycled materials. The students will learn how to police the glass, paper & plastic sorting skills and light bulb choices of their parents. They will sell us canvas shopping bags covered with pictures drawn in Sharpie marker of crying trees and slogans reminding us to reduce, reuse and recycle!

“Next year I am going to save the world.” My Kid said in happy anticipation, at the school festival last spring, believing this to be what one does in the third grade.

As children, we were told that the world was ours to save.

Years later my kid is being told the SAME THING because WE FAILED!

My generation was raised in the 1970’s during the Energy Crisis, in cold houses with adults fretting about the length of our showers and the high price of oil. “Could gasoline ever really go over $1 a gallon?” was one summer’s unending conversation. Yet, many of us grew up to buy SUV’s to chauffer our own kids from mall to soccer field to McMansion in suburban housing developments without any sidewalks, miles from the nearest store.

Renewable energy missionaries were out in force when I was a kid in the ’70’s:

I rode my bike to their revival meetings. I wanted to be an actress, but there wasn’t much live theater where I lived. Desperate for role models. I fell for The New Western Energy Show hook, line and sinker. It was like meeting the real life version of my Sunshine Family dolls, made by Mattel, Inc. (NYSE: MAT)

I even had the Sunshine Family Van. I considered it one of my best Christmas presents ever! It was converted truck, with a wooden shack on top, from which the dolls apparently sold handmade pottery and leather goods at craft fairs. So you see this all seemed to me, at the time, to be an acceptable, viable, creative, even mainstream, future way of life.

But, by the time I was graduating from high school and college in the ’80’s, communal living hippie-types had turned into selfish Yuppies, and those who hadn’t were scorned. I polished my resume and wore suits in order to project a professional image. Wall Street said “Greed is good”.

Now, hipsters are getting crafty with recycled textiles, making clothes and bags to sell at flea markets and festivals, magazines and newspapers offer frugal living tips, and billboards advertise energy saving appliances.

DEJA VU!