This is my first time online since leaving SF, so I'll just post a bunch of entries at once:

TRAINING WEEK

Tuesday 3/14/06

DANGER IN THE CIRCUS,
or, Why I Don't Let My Parents Read this Blog

The Big Top was raised Monday morning, and after lunch and we entered for our first rehearsal. There, hanging 20-28 feet up, were the ladders we'd be on. It really came home to me in a visceral way that part of my job for the next nine months is to risk my life twice a day. Hanging off this ladder, trusting myself my wits and strength and (at times) to a single piece of rope. No crash pad, no net.
Good thing I have a decent amount of self-confidence and ability to focus these days.

Okay, perhaps I'm being dramatic; this is not exactly a death-defying act as the circus goes. We're referred to as “showgirls” (though the circus version of the showgirl concept is somewhat different than other places), and our act is one that requires much less training than most of the others (compare trapeze, silk, wheel of destiny, etc). Still, learning something new that I'll be performing “at height” in 5 days is a bit unnerving.

At the circus center, the attitude is, “Do NOT go on that without a pad under it! Protect yourself, just in case,” Even for doing beats under a low hanging trapeze. This is not the SF Circus Center; I am not a student, and no one is worried about getting sued in case of accident. We're professionals, we're here to work, and we understand that a certain amount of risk is part of the job.
One ladder was down close to the ground for us to learn on. There was no crash pad under it for the learning process; in fact, it was over the wooden box of the circus “ring” (it's now an oval) and a metal ladder.

Here, falling is simply not an option.


CIRCUS FAMALIES/ Death-Defying Parents

Valeri and Andy, proud parents of a 2 1/2 week old baby, were practicing their motercycle on-a-wire act. Cycle on the wire, he's on the cycle, she's hanging underneath on a sort of wire. As far as I can tell, the act is pretty safe except for his backflip from the handlebars to the (narrow!) seat. He was practicing a flip on the motercycle --in a harness, which was good, since he wasn't getting it at first. There were a couple collective intakes of breath from the normally impassive crew as he was caught by the harness. I found myself thinkging, “Those people have a small baby...” Valeri, one of the former Bulgarian rhymic gymnasts, demonstrated the ladder act for us fearlessley and flawlessly, in spite of her still-shrinking-from-birth belly.

Fellow ladder performer Amarelle is married to Briman, who is a clown, acrobat, former trapeze artist, etc; they have 3 kids together. Tuesday I carried my lunch into the bigtop simply b/c it's cool and shady in there, and discovered Briman practicing the “Wheel of Destiny.” That's the thing that has one or two circles (this one has one) at the end of an arm or arms. A person runs inside the circle as the arm swings around, kind of like a hampster, but doing jumps and going upside down and stuff. Later, he or she gets out and runs on the outside. I found I couldn't relax enough to enjoy my food while he was practicing; I had to wait until he was down in order to eat. The worst was watching him skip rope on top of it, 30 feet up. “People have gotten maimed on those things,” a circus veteran tells me later. I understand why she doesn't like him doing it. When we ladder girls were all in there and he started practicing, Maribel left; she couldn't watch.


Wednesday 3/15/06

FEARS

“Do you have fear?”
Blaze, the amazing trapeze artist who is experienced in most aerial apparatai that I'm aware of, asked me after the first time I did the ladder routine at height:

“Well,” I replied. “I have concerns about the age and frayedness of the ankle loop, it's a new routine, on an apparatus that's new to me, higher than I'm used to, and I'm experiencing a fair amount of pain in my ankle because I'm not used to hanging by it, so yes, that all adds up to create some fear in me.”

“Good,” she reassured me, “You'd be insane if it didn't. But you'll get used to it.”

I felt better.

Still, my fears have been flapping around in my psyche, so I am going to let them out. Here they are:

Fears:
1.That the (old and frayed) single piece of cord suspending me by my ankle or wrist could rip, plunging me to death or serious injury. “It's happened,” Blaze tells me.
2.That one of the neat people I'm becoming friends with could get seriously injured.
3.That my body won't hold up to a physically intense and totally one sided twice-a-day performance routine, which could lead to a stress injury.
4.That I won't focus enough to train the way I want to outside of performance time.
5.That some other equipment failure (wire, hook, etc.) could cause a fall.
6.That some lapse of focus on my part could cause a fall.

The last two are last because I consider them least likely. I have to say, it is a relief that I am least afraid of myself; I don't know if I would have had the same self-confidence a few years ago.

There, I feel better to have them written down.


AT HEIGHT!

Monday: the bottom of the ladder is ~3 feet off the ground, we did the routine twice.
Tuesday: ladder bottom ~8 feet high, we did it twice or thrice, at separate times, and practiced climbing to height and spinning there.
Wednesday: ladder bottom~20 feet high, we did it twice at separate times.

The practices were infrequent and spaced out to give our bodies (notably our ankles) and our minds time to habituate themselves. Inbetween practices I put Traumeel gel on my ankle, massaged it, and gave it Reiki. It's been working; my ankle is not nearly as swollen as that of Geri, the new rythmic gymnast from Bulgaria. I played nureseand gave her a tube of arnica, and resQ ointment and a band-aid for her open blister.

Wednesday, around 10:15am, I climbed “my” ladder for the first time, about to trust my weight for the first time to an old strap no on has used yet this season. “Don't think about it,” I tell myself. “It's probably fine. Just do it.” And I did, as fast as possible. Pain motivated me to get on with it and not dilly-dally.


RUN THROUGH

The seventh time I do the act is our first run-through, Wednesday evening. I'm reasonably confident in both dance and ladder act. Amazingly, my ankle hurts less already, and I have less fear. Rob, from the office, consents to take a few pics of me with my palm phone; I take the time to pause and smile for this; it feels good. The pics are for the 6 year old girl and 3 year old boy I babysat in SF, who were very sad that I was leaving. As soon as I get down, I send a couple pics to their mother, along with one of me on my bed in the trailer, in front of the two art pieces the little girl sent along with me.

FEAR AND LOVE

It's getting toward the end of the 5 days of rehearsal.
I'm laying in my bunk, facing fear of death. Once again, the half-formed and rapidly denied image of some equipment malfunction appears in my mind, and once again I tell myself that it's unlikely, that I'm used to taking my life in my hands when I drive, and that furthermore everyone in the world who gets in a car on a daily basis risks their life on a daily basis. I sit with my fear. I think of MagicBoy talking about melting fear with love, and of Dr. Martin Luther King saying similar things. Like a child cuddling up with a blankie, I let myself tap into the heart connection with MagicBoy. I imagine him at Spirit Rock, and I know that if he thinks of me, it will be fondly, and with love, and I draw on that. I visualize the silver green spiral that connects our hearts, and I let myself be nourised. I feel grateful that this is as it is.

Later, it occurs to me that when I needed love, my reflex was to tap into romantic love, human love, and that I might be able to accomplish the same thing by conecting with the divine, if I focused on that. This seems more distant and abstact, more difficult for the time being. I realize suddenly that my reflex for love, for passion, even for spirituality, is to look for romantic love.

Why is that? I was raised without religion, without spiritual awareness.... Wait, is that true? Well, from my family I learned (in addition to disdain for most organized religion) respect and love for nature, family, human decency, and honor.... that's something, I should definitely honor that. Anyway, without a conscious sense of spirituality, and in a culture that esteems, idolizes, and obsesses over romantic love, I developed a habit of looking for connection in that. It's still there, and it's so much more famaliar that this newer, more abstract.... well, there it is right there. Spirituality is still somewhat abstract for me. It is a lot more tangible than it used to be, but it's not quite yet second nature for me to tap into some sense of divine connection.

It is interesting for me to watch this evolution within myself, this shift in framework, this falling off the intellectual bandwagon into new-agey, ooey-gooey, freakish, silly, unfounded, unprovable, weird, wu-wu, etc spirituality-land. There it is again, the athiest in me had to vent, had to get out her “I told you so”s in case all these new ideas don't stick, in case I look back on this “phase” of my life as that, the wu-wu San Francisco late twenties when I went off my rocker. Mostly, though, I am appreciating the unveiling of the magic, the blossoming of my senses and intuition and self-confidence and capability and and and. And. And all that other stuff, all the stuff I've wanted to believe in my whole life but not dared to, not let myself because that would be silly in a bad way, foolish, stupid, naieve, etc.

When as a child I read books that involved, as part of the plot, getting someone to make a leap of faith, and believe something they believed was impossible (for example the existance of something magical), a small part of my mind would hope that if I were ever presented with a similar situation, that I would be able to make the necessary leap of faith. That I would boldly let go of famaliar ideas in order to perceive the truth.
Faced with this in “real” live, I have been hesitant -not refusing, but hesitant, to let go of famaliar ideas and accept new ones. MagicBoy called me on it: “Your intellectual framework and the way you operate don't match.” He added something to the effect of: you pretend to be an atheiest (not his words), yet you function with a deeper awareness.

I felt the truth of his words, and started a big reevaluation, which continues now. Stay tuned for the next installment.

Sunday night, 3/19

THES STORY OF DESI'S DEATH

Shredder and I were hanging out in Theo and Desiree's moterhome, drinking shots of Jack and socializing while we waited for our sleeper to arrive. We've just done our first travel between towns, from Deland to Palm Coast, FL. Theo is one of the two ringmasters; Desiree is his wife. Two of their 3 teenage sons live in a trailer behind their moterhome and do small jobs with the circus. They told the very cute storey of their relationship: he fell in love with her instatnly, their first date was a few days later, and they've beeen together ever since. They started talking about their time with the Ringling Bros “Hometown Edition” show, and how great it was to travel with the Ringling train. (I want to do that someday!)

Somehow the conversation got around to the story of Desi's death. I'd heard the basic story before from Krysta after the silk lesson I took with her, when she was talking to me about rigging and safety. The outline is: During a Ringling shos, something holding up the silks broke, and the girl on the silk fell 30 feet onto a concrete floor, and died.
“What happened after she fell? Did the show go one? What did the ringmaster say?”
“I don't know any of that,” Krysta replied. She'd told me the story for a reason. The moral of the story was: Don't just blindly trust that the rigging is fine just because you're with a professional circus that puts up and takes down lots of rigging all the time.

So this story had been told to me to scare some sense into me, and here I find that some of my coworkers not only worked with the girl who died, one of them was the ringmaster there--- the very person who would have communicated with the audience about the incident. I felt callous for asking, but I couldn't help myself:: “What happened? Did the show continue?” I mean, we all know that the show must go on, but What If a performer DIES?? IN FRONT of an audience? Falls 30 feet and dies in front of thousands of people? Can those people really continue to watch and enjoy a show? Can the other performers continue?

Theo and Desiree tag teamed the story, like they had for the story of their romance, except that Renee took over entirely for a bit when Theo was overwhelmed by tears and left the room to compose himself. Theo came back and wrestled with his emotions to finish his part. It was pretty intense; I hesitate to write it down because I fear not doing it justice. I think I'll do it anyway, but not now, I'm in the cab of the canon and my laptop battery is about drained.

RUN CLEAN

The next morning, Monday, I was in a bad mood when I woke up. I lay in my bunk and asked myself,
“Why am I in such a bad mood?” Laying there and tuning into my body, I started to feel the pain I'd been ignoring, in my right ankle/achilled tendon, right hip, right posterior shoulder rotators, as well as various imbalances in my body. I had the following realization:
“I'm in pain, I'm tired, I haven't eaten enough, and I'm afraid. [Hearing the story of Desi's death, and having it brought home by the strong emotions I witnessed, had brought back the fear.]
...No wonder I'm in a bad mood!”
Having identified all this, I felt a lot better. I realized that in spite of all these issues, I was still really glad to be where I was, doing what I was doing. “I'm a circus performer!” I said to myself, yet again. The adventure inherent in this still thrills me.

Time to run, I decided. Not run away, but run my issues out. I put on running clothes and sunscreen, stretched the essentials briefly, and hit the road. Running, I felt better and better. My body started to loosen, and I had more realizations. I remembered that I'm an athlete, that I was one before I was a dancer, and that I have a bunch of other skills that will help me pull through this and other difficult situations.
“I'm not “just” a dancer (as if that is a small thing!); I'm also an athlete, a yogini, and a healer. I can take care of myself! I guess I'm an adult now. Wow, that actually feels good!” I think that in a certain way, growing up, I associated adulthood not only with responsibility and capability, but also with settling, with compromising self. It was a relief to feel grown up while feeling like the life I'm living is one big adventure. Yay!

Let it be acknowledged, though, now that I am writing this 6 days later, that I do not feel fully mature. I still get ungrounded, get snippy with my roommate when she does stupid stuff like repeatedly neglecting to lock the door or wash dishes before bed, or locking me out (away from my costume) right before I need to go on. I get selfish and give disproportionate amounts of attention to my own needs so that I forget that other people have legitimate stresses and I should give them a break, etc. Knowing is half the battle, though; I feel like I'm constantly making progress.


3/25/06 sunday, Leaving SAVANNAH

I've had so much on my mind to write! I've got the laptop (thanks StoicLover, thinking of you) in the cab of the canon where I'm riding with Andrey. We're between Savannah and Agusta; 147 miles.

I had a wonderful experience in Savannah, and now have a warm feeling in my heart for the place. Perhaps the seed of this idea existed before, and that helped me have a good experience there.
It started out well: I slept well and long, woke determined to go for a run, and in the middle of the run stopped and sat in front of some wild bushes, vines, and flowers and had a great meditation session. More about that later.

Saturday night Rob, Shredder, Cleary, and TrapezeBoy and I went out to a fabulous gay club in downtown Savannah. It felt like home: there was electronic music, a Burner spinning glosticks who happily gave me a hug on request, and a fantastic drag show upstairs! I spun poi for like the 3rd time in my life, and actually managed to spin them a bit. Fun fun fun!


ROAD DRAMA

Agusta Mall, Agusta, Georgia
Sunday night, 1am.

I've been chilling in the cab of the canon, making phone calls while I wait for my sleeper to arrive. Andy, the driver, operator, and maintainer of the canon, left as soon as we arrived at the mall to join his wife and their baby in their trailer. Supposedly the sleeper was not far behind and will be here soon.
I see a sleeper pull in all the way across the parking lot, pick up my things, lock the cab of the canon, and set off toward the trailers, across the lined asphalt expanse where the tent will be tomorrow. Once again I am glad to have the longish hooded down parka I bought for $6 (new!), at Steve&Barry's, a retail chain where *everything* is $6..
“Hey, hey, come here!” Two workers waiting for their sleeper in the cab of a semi beckon me over. Paco gets out and walks toward me.
“That's not your sleeper. Your sleeper won't get here for a while. Did you hear? Bonni had a big accident.”
“What!! Are they alright?”
“I think so.”
And the baby?”
“I think so.”
Bonni's husband drives my sleeper, hence the delay. Obviously I 'm more concerned about Bonni, her 7 month old baby, and her aunt.
The 24-hour man comes over to talk to us. He also had heard that everyone was alright.
“Did anyone go to the hospital?” I want more info; 'Alright' means different things to different people, expecially after a car accident.
“Not that I heard of.” I'm somewhat reassured, but not fully; I'm not convinced that they would let bad news spread if there were any. Once again I think of Desi and how the news of her death was witheld from her co-performers for a few hours.

Whose door shall I knock on? I wonder. The ringmasers seem to be the most social and generous... as Kelly has a (completely unrequited) crush on me, I decide to knock on Theo and Desiree's door. Their huge moterhome is easy to find, they're up, and Theo, being happily married, does not have a crush on me. So now once again I'm benefitting from the generosity of Theo and Desiree, hanging out in their moterhome while I wait for sleeper and news.

2 hours later:
It's offical; everyone is merely shaken up. Shredder and Cleary (Bonni's husband) were behind the trailer, and came upon it soon after it jacknifed and turned onto its side. Shredder called 911 as soon as they saw it, then went ahead and checked everyone out, as she is an EMT (go multi-talanted girl!). Hupavina is most bruised; she wasn't wearing her seatbelt and was thrown against the carseat. Shredder said the baby was calm until Bonni started crying from psychogenic shock. Thank goodness all seems to be ending reasonably well. Their truck is getting towed somewhere, and Andy is towing the trailer back with his truck; hopefully they had insurance, and hopeuflly it is salvagable.