Tag: Ringling Bros.

Funundrum, Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey

For our Easter celebration we went to see the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus this evening.  It was the 7:30 pm and the last show in Madison Square garden, a full house with lots of little girls in pretty spring dresses.  The rigging was hauled away to be packed onto the truck at the end of each act.

Funundrum–what a strange title.

I could tell by the poster that the publicity machine had gone into action before the show had a headline act.

And, the show didn’t have a headline act.

co·nun·drum  n.

1. A riddle in which a fanciful question is answered by a pun.
2. A paradoxical, insoluble, or difficult problem; a dilemma
The acts were good.
Johnathan Lee Iverson is my favorite Ringling ringmaster.
And yet,
The show was oddly boring.
The music and the pace, driving driving driving relentlessly towards the finish.
But,
it was all the same rushed tempo,
Every single act.
The entire show as though to the same song.
The waitress at our local diner agreed with me.
Something was off.
There were only 10 clowns.  (Only one girl.)
Tigers and elephants and farm animals.
All my favorite acts were there, tightrope, trapeze, teter-board.
But,
The show didn’t quite work
A Connundrum

How to buy circus tickets

I took myself all the way up to Madison Square Garden to buy tickets to the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus which we will attend on the evening of Easter Sunday.  I like to look at the map of the seats because I like to try and get seats on the front track.

I recommend going ahead of time to pick up any tickets for an event at Madison Square Garden.  The WILL CALL set up is a mess and I have seen families come into their seats 45 minutes after the show started because it takes so long to wait in line to pick up tickets and then another long time to wait for bags to be searched and another long time after the tickets have been scanned and still more time to go up all the stairs and through the concrete corridors before arriving in the right section.

I hate Madison Square Garden.

After the show the escalators are always turned off.  It feels like a fire drill.  It makes me think of–what if a fire.

I am uneasy in that building.

I wish the old Penn Station, the beautiful one I never saw, had never been torn down in the name of Urban Renewal.

But we go to see the circus every year.

Zing Zang Zoom

We went to see Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus at Madison Square Garden, last week, on Good Friday, when we Catholics are supposed to be thinking sad and sombre thoughts.

Oh well.

I hate Madison Square Garden! It’s an ugly inefficient maze of a construction made all the more tragic because the old Pennsylvania Train Station was torn down to build it. I never saw it, but I’ve seen pictures and read descriptions of it being even more grand and beautiful than Grand Central Station.

Anyway, Zing Zang Zoom was better than we expected from the poster which said to me (as an experienced circus goer): “Yikes, we left Winter Quarters without a headline act.”

I had pithy thoughts of circuses and life–but they are gone, victims of the Easter/lice chaos.

I watched energetic young clown Joy Powers and missed my physical youth as I willingly paid way too much for cotton candy, a plush elephant named “Asia” and a plastic pony shaped beer stein filled with ice and sugar syrup for my own little force of nature.

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.

Clownlab…Theatrelab

Clownlab
Clownical Trials
Red wine
Ringling Bros.
Madison Square Garden
Jerzy Grotowski
Living Theatre
NYU Film School
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Warner Bros.
Chuck Jones
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9/11
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Eugene, Oregon
Carlo Mazzone-Clementi
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South Paris, Maine
Passover Seder
Central Park
Sunburn
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Improvisation
Raising children
Rental
Fri/Sat
Box office take
October or March
TBA
Theatrelab

Went to Clown Lab…

I am always conflicted; playing with my child vs housework.  Writing vs performing.  Exercising vs volunteering at My Kid’s school.  Creativity vs getting a real job and on and on and on.  So it wasn’t out of character for me when Jef started to talk about being in the theatrical space, I caught my mind wandering and had to bring it back into the room three times.  The first time I realized I had gone off topic was when my mind came back into the room  after I learned that Saturday’s workshop is 3-6 instead of 11-2 as I had thought.  This lead to a working out of numerous scenarios for My Kid’s weekend schedule as I had made tentative  plans with another mother to take the kids to see a movie on Saturday afternoon.   The second time I lost concentration was when in the course of developing an improv I fell into a bit of a reverie about Bush falling through a trap-door at the swearing in ceremony and Obama coming down from the sky in an airline pilot’s uniform…  The third time my mind wandered away from the studio work at hand, I thought about a handbag I used to own and wondered if I could use any found object to develop a relationship with up to and including grief and loss and weather that would be a good clown piece for me to work up.  I’m tired and wide awake  from several cups of coffee and several cups of green tea and my mind is still full of meaning of life, good work, and competency vs heroism thoughts that arise from the safe landing of a disabled plane in the Hudson River and timely rescue of all the passengers by local boat crews and the preparations for the upcoming Obama Presidential Inauguration.  There’s a clown lab scheduled for Tuesday, but I will not go.  I already know that my head and my heart will be in Washington, DC where I would rather be at this historic time. I moved from Montana for a post-graduate job in my congressman’s office on Capitol Hill and  I auditioned for Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Clown College  in the center ring of the arena between shows while the Circus played Washington DC. I hope to spend Tuesday evening drinking champagne  at home with my husband and watching the recap of the Inauguration Day on TV.

Families of Clowns

Sometimes I have dreams that are so clear and simple that when I wake up I am surprised that it didn’t really happen.  This morning I awoke after one such dream.

I was sitting in a booth in a dark dive bar in Williamsburg with friends looking at a 4-page color pull-out section of the newspaper about the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Clown College Reunion taking place across the river.  The feature contained a full page of yearbook-like rows of small portraits of families of clowns, parents and children in full makeup and costume.  I felt sad and left out because I clown alone without my family.

This much is true:  As the New York Clown Theatre Festival was taking place, there was also a reunion of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clowns hosted by Greg and Karen DeSanto in Baraboo, Wisconsin (Not Manhattan as in my dream).  Jay Stewart was involved in the organization of the event.  Jay is married to Kristen and they have 2 kids who perform with them sometimes.  There are other couples I know, or know of, mostly former Ringling Clowns, like Tommy and Tammy Parrish who worked together on the circus and went back to the real world after they had kids.  They still perform, and sometimes their kids join in the act. There is a part of me who would love to clown like that.

However, my life did not work out that way.  Although I did meet my husband working in a theatre and he has an acting resume, that’s was never really his thing.  He was a director and uses the skills he developed in that capacity in a management role in the real world. (So we have insurance–yeah!)  The Kid we produced together hid in my arms in the kitchen when there was a clown at a birthday party.  She was not at all happy when I paid attention to other children when I was a clown at her preschool’s annual fundraiser.  As a dance student she refused to perform and would not even put on the little tutu for a photo with classmates.

During the recent New York Clown Festival I went to events on my own.  I didn’t see as many performances as I had planned.  I didn’t see many performances at all.  The nights I was scheduled to be on stage involved so much planning and jumping through hoops in order for My Kid to be picked up from school and escorted to and picked up from Brownies and soccer.  She requires frequent feedings and regular bedtimes.  It is considered bad form for an 8-year-old to hang out with a bunch of clowns in a dive bar in Williamsburg on a school night.  There were other complications.  The Husband was away on a business trip for much of the festival.  Although I’d visualized many evenings of passing the ball of responsibility for My Kid to The Husband the moment he walked through the door, hopping on the G-train on Lafayette and hopping off at Metropolitan for an evening of cutting edge clown performances from all over the world– that I would be able to see FOR FREE with my participants badge–followed by career promoting beer, shop talk and networking at the Lazy Catfish. Ha!.  I saw one show on a night I did not perform.  It cost me over $50 for a babysitter.   As I was leaving, I passed Ishah Jansen-Faith on her way to the theatre. Hey are you coming back?  No way.  I would have had to pay the babysitter over $100 if I stayed for the free cabaret.

That’s why people put their kids in their acts.

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.