Tag: Larry Pisoni

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.

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.

Humor Abuse

We went to see Lorenzo Pisoni’s solo show, “Humor Abuse” at the Manhattan Theatre Club last night. It was a touching performance by a man who in the 1970’s was a child clown in the San Francisco based Pickle Family Circus and who as an adult is a serious New York actor.

I never saw the Pickle Family Circus, but we watched videos with reverence at Clown College because that was where Bill Irwin (the clown who became a MacArthur Fellow had gone to develop his own style with Larry Pisoni and Geoff Hoyle after graduating from the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Clown College (and Oberlin). But, I remember the black and white photograph of Larry Pisoni with his son in identical clown costumes. As a novice clown struggling to master basic juggling in a few short weeks, growing up with circus parents seemed like a much easier way to go.

Apparently not.

According to the show “Humor Abuse” learning to be a clown from a father who is a professional clown didn’t sound that much different from growing up with a football coach for a father. Same type of obsession just practicing different skills. I’m thinking sports analogies because yesterday afternoon before seeing Lorenzo Pisoni’s show and this morning after the performance, I escorted My Kid to her first and second AYSO soccer games of the season. As an eight-year-old she is unable to participate in league soccer unless her parents are also willing to participate on a game by game basis.

I think about the similarities between playing fields and circus rings. I didn’t play team sports as a child and didn’t find that kind of focus until I began to perform with the Missoula Children’s Theatre under the direction of Jim Caron, at about the same time that Lorenzo. Pisoni was working with his father. The two organizations had the same do-it-yourself aesthetic of the 1970’s that grew out of the cooperative ideals of the 1960’s and shaped the lives of those who came of age in the 1980’s.

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!!!!!!