Seriously, Is this Safe
Now in England when we do this sort of thing, we
might organise a couple of shows in a day, although that would generally
allow for a little more traveling. On checking the schedule, it
turns out that they had arranged six. We had two more in the local
Grammar school before lunch, one at an old people’s home afterwards,
and then we were doing an 'open' show for everyone from the local
area that evening. It turns out this was the revised schedule. Originally
they'd organised nine shows. The extra ones had been put off until
tomorrow when someone had actually realised that was ridiculous.
This is what you get for agreeing to do something like this three
days before it all kicks off. You have no say in the planning, and
I found myself wondering again just what had I let myself in for.
The next stop, as I said was the local grammar
school. Now we can hardly claim to be working with disadvantaged
kids at this point, but I'm a firm believer that you shouldn't miss
out on options like this simply because you're not causing
all kinds of chaos during your formative years.
So we turned up at the grammar school and we caused
all kinds of chaos. We started off doing a very informal show in
the playground. A bit of balancing, a bit of juggling and a lot
of mucking about. Then we had a more 'formal' show for about a hundred
and fifty of the children. We were beginning to gel. I had a better
idea where I could slot into what Jonathan was doing with the various
props he uses, and he was starting to add heckles and lines to what
I was doing.
Although I mess around when I’m doing these things,
as I’ve said before, I’m not a clown as such. Clowning is a different
kind of humour, and it was really good fun working, and for that matter
traveling with Jonathan, because he often saw boundaries that could
be pushed that ‘normal people’ wouldn’t think of pushing. I think
there is something which for the sake of discussion I’ll call ‘clowns
courage’. It’s being able to put yourself out on a limb, knowing
you may be overstepping the mark, but that you realise nothing really
bad is actually going to happen, and more to the point, it could
just be funny.
It helped us work ways around the language barrier;
through the wonder of interpretative ‘acting like idiots’ and fortunately
we still had Horsch doing the translating for us where necessary
which was a big help. Again we had the press come to talk to us
after the show. Xantern hadn't struck me as a big town so far, but
they sure had a lot of local papers. We also had a couple of teachers
come to ask us just how dangerous certain parts of the act were.
Now I'm not going to completely give the game away, but lets just
say, we got away without being arrested on this occasion, and we’ll
call it magic.
We headed back to Clive’s for lunch. We were late…
again. We hadn't been late for a show yet, but we made up for it
by being late to just about everything else. We sat down and had
lunch with Clive and his kids, Aiden and Siobahn. Over the two days
we were there Aiden and Siobahn kept us entertained with some serious
clowning around. We managed to avoid a food fight over lunch (Fortunately
I'm a juggler and not a clown or it could have been chaos - at least
I occasionally catch what is thrown at me), and then we had a chance
to relax for a little bit. Clive showed us round his garden, and
discussed bits of archaeology, of which both he and Kirsten are
professors at the local university. It was the perfect middle to
the day which just allowed us to chill for a while.
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