EUROPE – Clownmommy

Time Passages

I feel it more strongly now, the passage of time.

Tonight was the last New York Downtown Clown Revue and Golden Nose Awards.

A community of clowns.

Moving on.

There were two new babies there.

I remembered the Clown College Reunion at Circus Circus in Las Vegas in 2001. Somewhere there is a photo of me in full makeup and costume wearing my baby in a bijorn carrier

Some clowns talked of weddings.

I remembered all the Annex weddings at the end of the 1990’s.

Our kids are big now. A new generation is just starting marriages and families.

The mortality elephant-in-the-room, cancer, was there in conversation about a mutual friend in the hospital and in the presence one who hid her bald head under a hat.

And the story keepers there too;

Hovey Burgess gave an award to Michael Christianson and told stories of the days of Larry Pisoni and The Pickle Family Circus and the San Francisco Mime Troupe and touring Europe and the early days of the Big Apple Circus. Jim Moore was there with his camera.

It is a real community, the clown community.

The Day after the Jango Edwards Workshop

Jango warned us that we would experience a let down after the workshop is over, and it is true. I am feeling very much alone here in my apartment while My Kid is at school and The Husband is at work. But, thankfully, I have a performance coming up on Monday to keep my mind and body occupied. I am feeling connected to the clown community though. Last night in Soho I talked to Michael Bongar and Stanley Sherman and Jim Moore, contemporaries of Jango Edwards, who became a clown in the 1970’s, working the streets of Europe. John Towsen, author of Clowns was there too. I just got an e-mail from Kendall. Someone from Circus Cirkor playing at BAM this week contacted her to talk about clown and risk.

Speaking of risk, it was a risk to take the Jango Edwards workshop this week. Based on what I had seen on the internet, I found him offensive and scary and I was dis-inclined to take the workshop. But, Jef Johnson said that his workshops are inspirational. So I took the risk.

Jango’s aesthetic is certainly not mine, but the way he talks about the importance of clowns in the world is something I have not heard since I was last around Steve Smith. There is something wonderful about the belief that the world needs more clowns when one is a clown or a clown in training. When I was at Clown College, we were working and sweating and nursing injuries because we were trying so hard to win of the contracts to tour with The Greatest Show on Earth, kind of like So You Think You Can Dance. At the same time we were taught that it was important for us to appreciate what we had been given. It seemed a happy bit of subversive action, reflected in the promotional materials at the time, that there was as much pride in the Clown College graduates who had gone on to become doctors, teachers and lawyers as those who become name entertainers or part of Clown Alley on the Red Unit or the Blue Unit.

Steve Smith made sure that when we left Clown College, with our professionally designed agent suits and our make-up kits full of the Krylon, Mehron and Ben Nye products that worked best for our particular skin, in addition to all of the crafts and skills we had been taught by our many impressive teachers, that it was our obligation to be kind and generous to all clowns. As healthy 20-somethings who had just had the door to the corporate entertainment industry opened for us, it was humbling to be reminded to respect and appreciate the work of those who learned everything they know about clowning in a class at a senior center or at clown club conventions.

Sometimes stage and cabaret clowns and Ringling-style clowns look askance at each other’s aesthetic sensibilities, but Jango, who brings to mind Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters wants all the clowns to come together in the same community.

The way Jango used music in his workshop reminded me of the Search Weekends at the Newman Center when I was in college. After intensive days of learning and sharing we would stand in a circle with our arms around each other, tears shining in our eyes as we sang Simon and Garfunkle’s Bridge Over Troubled Water. With Jango we did the same thing, but the song was Smile, by Charlie Chaplin.

The Sunday before I took Jango’s workshop, I attended a talk about fasting and almsgiving, which are part of all the major world religions because they can lead to humility and transformation. The same can be said of a good clown.

La Familia Dimitri

We took My Kid to see La Familia Dimitri at the New Victory Theatre in Times Square. I’m so glad we did. The Clown Dimitri, even in his 70’s is still charming and adorable and his offspring, all in their 40’s, are fit and accomplished performers with careers of their own who came together for this international tour were a joy to watch.

The Dimitri family alternated between hard-won skills and novelty gags without the shrill hard sell of so many American variety entertainers.

I know there is more support in Europe for this sort of thing which doesn’t take away from the fact that the Dimitris are an amazing family! Yet I wonder how much easier it must be for performing artists to develop in a country where there are grants and support. They have a chance to breathe and practice and learn new skills without quite as many worries about basics like health care.

In his own show, Lorenzo Pisoni talked about his dad falling wrong during one of his performances “and after eight months of chewing asprin finally going to the doctor and learning he had broken his back and it had healed badly”. How could someone who makes their living as a physical comedian let something like that go for so long, I imagine, unless he happened not to have health insurance at the time of the accident. Hmmm. That was a bad fall. Should I go to the emergency room or the doctor? No. If they find something they will want to operate and that can only lead to bankrupcy. Better not to know.

So Larry Pisoni doesn’t do his Lorenzo Pickle act anymore but the 72-year-old clown Dimitri of Switzerland is still going strong and all three of his children are performers and still making new work in their 40’s.

I also think of frumpy Susan Boyle, 47-year-old youtube sensation, who shocked the “Britain’s Got Talent” by having a beautiful singing voice even though she didn’t look like a 21-year-old supermodel.

Watching the Dimitri family play their instruments together between feats of circus prowess, I thought of how many hours they had spent making music together apart from the hours spent learning their circus skills while they were growing up and how rare it is to be able to build that kind of time into the hurried, penny and minute counting chopped-up, scheduled days that form the backbone of culture in which I am raising my child.

Someone is on a business trip and it’s not me

Someone in this family is in EUROPE on business AND IT’S NOT ME.

IT SHOULD BE ME. I’M THE ONE who studied French. I’M THE ONE who loves to travel. I’M THE ONE who has a list of European clowns and circuses and opera companies I want to see. I’M THE ONE creating a non-verbal physical theatre that I hope will take me to EUROPE someday.

Instead, I am hiding in the bedroom trying to write (as a journalism grad it was supposed to be my career once upon a time) while My Kid watches too much “Spongebob Squarepants” and eats sugared cereal in the other room. I feel guilty because as a “stay-at-home-mom” I am supposed to prepare frugal yet organic meals in my beautiful yet practically decorated home while simultaneously presiding over creative art projects and planning educational outings for my offspring.

When a couple has a baby, as a general rule, one of the careers takes a back seat. Nursing mothers have to work so hard not to stay home that they generally stay home. Then one by one women on maternity leave go back to work and after a while the only adults pushing strollers to play group and playgrounds are the professional caregivers, freelancers and artists.

Subsidized childcare outside weekday office hours is rare. Jobs with irregular hours are not. Nannies can cost less than daycare, but the economy comes from being able to offer a regular schedule. If I was in rehearsal for a play now, instead of “working on a piece”, I’d be screwed.

I am enabling The Husband to have both career and family simply by being the one who is always around. It is the path of least resistance. For a woman without paid help or near-by relatives involved with her children to the point of sleep-over babysitting, it would be almost impossible to leave the country for a week WITH ONLY 2 DAYS NOTICE.

When I was still single, I worked in Japan as part of a group of 10 variety entertainers on a 4-month contract. Two of the men had toddlers and neither was still with the mother.

“She was into having a baby…but, I couldn’t practice at home…so I had to leave…” said one of the jugglers.

The mother of a teenager almost broke her contract when her own mother, who her daughter was staying with, called to let the performer know that her child was cutting classes and threatening to drop out of high school. Her juggling partner and husband (who was not the father of the teenager) didn’t think it was his problem.

Another juggler desperately missed his 3 boys, but his relationship with his wife was not good.

Sigh.

Work is hard. When combined with family life it can seem almost impossible.

There is ego involved as well.

When My Kid was a baby, I met several men who were stay-at-home-dads (because they worked in the arts and their wives had the jobs with insurance). Inevitably when I next saw their kids on the playground they were with a babysitter and when I next ran into the men, they had gone back to work because being home with the kids and not working was making them crazy.

I can’t find it now, but a while ago, I read a blog that was started by a man who was staying home with his infant son. He blogged about how easy it was to plop his kid into the jogging stroller and go for a run. He blogged about training seriously each morning before his wife left for work. He was a triathlete or marathon runner or something like that. The days were going so smoothly he didn’t know why more men didn’t stay home with their babies. The blog ended abruptly after a month or two. No more entries.

My body doesn’t work like it used to

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.