Lorenzo Pisoni – Clownmommy

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.

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.