This is Ann. I say 'is' on purpose.
http://apodolske.blogspot.com/2010/06/love-to-you-all-june-1-2010.html
Note how she apologized to those she couldn't get to because she was busy dying. That, "Sorry!" at the end just nails me every time because it could have been written with a number of inflections. Sincerely. Kindly. Or ironically. Probably all of them at once.
See that? Right there could seem a wee disrepectful to the recently deceased, right?Accusing a dying woman of being ironic? But she would have laughed. Comedy that is worth its salt is also worth a risk sometimes too. She got that. Most lady comics do.
Ann lived in the Northampton area, pretty far from Boston but close to some other lady comic friends, Boney and Jennifer. Jennifer and Ann often traveled together. I met her doing Jennifer's Girls! Girls! Girls! show at The Pace Center in Easthampton. Jennifer's fiance Scott was always there too. I loved being around them. No one made me laugh harder. Jennifer called us 'lady comics' because it was exactly right.
Ann died in 2010, shortly after the passing of her life partner of a decade and a half, Linda. As you can see from her writing, she didn't want to go. It was too early yet.
We still share our love and admiration for her. When I see Jennifer and Scott, I see Ann too. It's the beauty of being a Lady Comic. Just because you are gone, doesn't mean that you aren't here with us too.
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Circus Geek In The Classical Sense
I cannot tell you how many times that I have almost stepped on a contortionist.
Usually they are on a mat somewhere on a floor space when not on the
stage stretching. Constantly. Sometimes they stop to eat or go to the
bathroom. Same goes for the aerial acts but not as extreme. You can also find them standing on their hands. The hand balancing acts are particularly partial to being upside down. All of them stretching and prepping. They are athletes who are performers. Their bodies are machines. You won't find Doritos backstage.
The hoop acts and the jugglers are perfectionists. They work on their acts at home mostly probably because someone might get hit. Timing and physical pliability and strength is pertinent to their work. Group acts remind me of the dozers in Fraggle Rock only more creative with better outfits. Work work work don't screw up fix it if you do work work work.
The band is huge, a well oiled beast designed to entertain when they need to entertain and blend when they need to blend. It takes a while to get past the borg and meet the individuals. Everyone of the members are trained and extremely skilled in their own right. They also take longer to get set up than anyone in the show because their act requires so many people fine tuning so many parts. Often they are playing when we are eating or backstage prepping.
The dancers traveled in a swarm of costumes and female energy. Two different teams...the burlesque performers and the more traditional dancers.....moved in a protective bubble of familiarity and objective. Many of them knew the circus acts and there was moments of connecting but mostly it is about the collective.
I've never been in a place where perfect is so essential to the show. Organic improvisation...the cornerstone for creating my characters..... is for the creative process, getting to the stage and to redeem a moment when perfection was marred. After that it can bunk up the works.
There are a few times in life when you walk into a new place that is important to you and you feel absolutely like an outsider. A new school. A new job. Summer camp. Everyone is canoodling and hugging and reminiscing and there you are with nothing to offer in the familiar social structure.And, in this case, the majority of people are perfect looking human specimens with bodies that are fine tuned for strength and balance. Even if someone is built bulkier than the lithe creatures that make up most of them, they are solid muscle. Nothing on earth could possibly make a soul with image issues feel more ungainly and old than a room full of circus performers. Even a fashion model can't stick a toe in their ear.
When I walked into the theatre, my actor writer ego went out the window and I became the proverbial chicken head biting carnival geek freak. I am not suspended from the ceiling by my toes. My ability to playing,well, anything, in the band is limited to a decent enough singer, who can play piano by ear a little because sheet music is too complicated. Juggling sounds fun if I ever actually tried which I haven't. And if I could, there is a big difference between tossing a ball up in a pattern verses standing on another persons shoulders and flipping pins in perfect alignment while one or two or three catches and returns it back at to me to music.
However within the dynamics of a traditional carnival, a geek is still considered a skilled laborer. Have you ever had to hold a live chicken ? Without the motivation of holding it still to fit your mouth around its head enough to bite it off without getting pecked? Not easy. Hell, the idea of a giant mouth trying to sink its teeth around my neck would send me into a conniption too and I have an i.q.. I could see why this would draw the curious and impress an audience with the performer's determination, how this performer would eventually be accepted into the family of acts after proving his worth.
So I accepted the carnival geek challenge, in this instance being one of the two people in the circus to string the words together to make sense of the show and give the circus acts a reason to be there. And to pretend I am a homicidal yet funny mob boss.
Our shows had run about monthly and rotated acts so we would do a full out tech/dress rehearsal the day of show. We would have one hour to eat dinner and then run two back to back performances. By the time we got done, all of us had been running for around 10 hours, many of us pushing our bodies to extremes.
Sometimes there was a second wind but this last night, several of us wound up in one of the dressing room quietly talking, delaying exuding the energy needed to pack up the room. Other times some would go out and dance while the band kept playing but it was February and so many of us had been ill with colds or one of the plethora of viral/bacterial nuisances that took its toll on a body. A juggler was reading a book. A aerialist was talking to my co-writer/actor. A lady was sitting in the lap of another juggler. One of the other juggler deftly unhooked the bra of the ingenue act when giving her a hug. It was depressurization. It was nice. Cold was outside. The shows had sold out. The audience was delighted. Their youth and perfection still intimidated me but I did my job too. They were just people now until later when they put their circus back on and I go back to being a geek.
The hoop acts and the jugglers are perfectionists. They work on their acts at home mostly probably because someone might get hit. Timing and physical pliability and strength is pertinent to their work. Group acts remind me of the dozers in Fraggle Rock only more creative with better outfits. Work work work don't screw up fix it if you do work work work.
The band is huge, a well oiled beast designed to entertain when they need to entertain and blend when they need to blend. It takes a while to get past the borg and meet the individuals. Everyone of the members are trained and extremely skilled in their own right. They also take longer to get set up than anyone in the show because their act requires so many people fine tuning so many parts. Often they are playing when we are eating or backstage prepping.
The dancers traveled in a swarm of costumes and female energy. Two different teams...the burlesque performers and the more traditional dancers.....moved in a protective bubble of familiarity and objective. Many of them knew the circus acts and there was moments of connecting but mostly it is about the collective.
I've never been in a place where perfect is so essential to the show. Organic improvisation...the cornerstone for creating my characters..... is for the creative process, getting to the stage and to redeem a moment when perfection was marred. After that it can bunk up the works.
There are a few times in life when you walk into a new place that is important to you and you feel absolutely like an outsider. A new school. A new job. Summer camp. Everyone is canoodling and hugging and reminiscing and there you are with nothing to offer in the familiar social structure.And, in this case, the majority of people are perfect looking human specimens with bodies that are fine tuned for strength and balance. Even if someone is built bulkier than the lithe creatures that make up most of them, they are solid muscle. Nothing on earth could possibly make a soul with image issues feel more ungainly and old than a room full of circus performers. Even a fashion model can't stick a toe in their ear.
When I walked into the theatre, my actor writer ego went out the window and I became the proverbial chicken head biting carnival geek freak. I am not suspended from the ceiling by my toes. My ability to playing,well, anything, in the band is limited to a decent enough singer, who can play piano by ear a little because sheet music is too complicated. Juggling sounds fun if I ever actually tried which I haven't. And if I could, there is a big difference between tossing a ball up in a pattern verses standing on another persons shoulders and flipping pins in perfect alignment while one or two or three catches and returns it back at to me to music.
However within the dynamics of a traditional carnival, a geek is still considered a skilled laborer. Have you ever had to hold a live chicken ? Without the motivation of holding it still to fit your mouth around its head enough to bite it off without getting pecked? Not easy. Hell, the idea of a giant mouth trying to sink its teeth around my neck would send me into a conniption too and I have an i.q.. I could see why this would draw the curious and impress an audience with the performer's determination, how this performer would eventually be accepted into the family of acts after proving his worth.
So I accepted the carnival geek challenge, in this instance being one of the two people in the circus to string the words together to make sense of the show and give the circus acts a reason to be there. And to pretend I am a homicidal yet funny mob boss.
Our shows had run about monthly and rotated acts so we would do a full out tech/dress rehearsal the day of show. We would have one hour to eat dinner and then run two back to back performances. By the time we got done, all of us had been running for around 10 hours, many of us pushing our bodies to extremes.
Sometimes there was a second wind but this last night, several of us wound up in one of the dressing room quietly talking, delaying exuding the energy needed to pack up the room. Other times some would go out and dance while the band kept playing but it was February and so many of us had been ill with colds or one of the plethora of viral/bacterial nuisances that took its toll on a body. A juggler was reading a book. A aerialist was talking to my co-writer/actor. A lady was sitting in the lap of another juggler. One of the other juggler deftly unhooked the bra of the ingenue act when giving her a hug. It was depressurization. It was nice. Cold was outside. The shows had sold out. The audience was delighted. Their youth and perfection still intimidated me but I did my job too. They were just people now until later when they put their circus back on and I go back to being a geek.
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