A real treat

Last night I had an unexpected treat. My department at work had been offered free tickets to the final dress rehearsal of the new Cirque du Soleil production, "Iris."

I carpooled with a co-worker, and it took us 2 hours to get from Santa Monica to the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood and Highland. It was five minutes till curtain by the time we parked. We dashed up the escalators from the huge parking garage, hoping to get to the Will Call for our tickets before the show started - and then we rushed inside through the first set of doors.

How lucky we were! We found seats in the lower orchestra section, only six rows from the front! As we watched, the aerialists soared directly over our heads!

"Iris" is subtitled "A Journey Through the World of Cinema" - and it evokes the history of movies. It dazzles with a fast-paced blend of live action, video projection, and amazing feats of circus skill. What better place to see it than on Hollywood Boulevard?

The show started off strongly, with an aerial duet that took my breath away.



Photos were not allowed, so I only snuck a few before the show started. But here is the Cirque's own highlight video to give you an idea.

"Iris" is supposed to play a long run at the Kodak. If you visit Los Angeles, check it out. There's nothing more fun than having trapeze flyers bungee cord above your head!

PROMPTuesday

Every Tuesday, Sandiegomomma posts a writing prompt to inspire the creativity of writers. Today's prompt:

What major decision(s) have you made in your life? What road did you take that led to something unexpected, or wonderful or not-so-wonderful-but-it-all-worked-out-in-the-end?


I was stale, I was stuck. I was in a rut. I had ambitions, but they weren't getting me anywhere. I was a freelance theatre technician, in the competitive world of New York City theatre, and each day I worked I worried about the next day without work.

And yes, I was sabotaging myself. I was indiscreet, I was impolitic. I drank with my coworkers and bosses. I slept with my co-workers and bosses. It was fun - like Edna St. Vincent Millay said, "my candle burned at both ends" - but I wasn't helping myself professionally.

I had just ended a doomed affair. He was a handsome older man - he had a brush with celebrity in his past that added to his cachet. He had a studio penthouse in a doorman building on lower Fifth Avenue - so unlike my life so far in New York, set in tenements and SoHo lofts, so each trip up the elevator to his rooftop terrace thrilled me. He admired my intelligence, he complimented my looks, he talked dirty about my body. He had long hair swept back from his noble forehead in a widow's peak, he had a neatly trimmed beard and strikingly turquoise eyes.

He was also a two-timing shithead.

After he'd left New York for the Pacific Northwest, I got a letter from him announcing his marriage to a woman whose name I'd seen autographed on photos at his desk. When I shared this with my friend Sophie over drinks in a SoHo pub she was sympathetic, but after the third round she confessed that he'd slept with her, too.

It had been one of those things, she said. She hadn't thought I was really serious about him.

Well - actually, I wasn't. When I look back at that time, that age, I realize that I deliberately chose to fall in love with men like that. Commitment-shirkers, wriggling out of my grasp, fleeing, eluding, betraying.

In a funny way, they were people just like me. I had done the same thing to nicer men, myself. I was just as afraid of commitment, just as duplicitous. That didn't stop me from feeling aggrieved. The ashes of my romance and the stall in my professional life depressed me and made me long for something different.

But I missed him anyway. I passed his door on Fifth Avenue. I could hear his voice among the drinkers at the White Horse Tavern on Greenwich Avenue. I could see his silhouette behind the glare of lights as I worked. I couldn't bear to be with Sophie anymore, and it was hard to know which loss hurt more.

I had a regular job at a theatrical lighting rental shop on Eleventh Avenue. I could work there by day and then run a show at night, when I had one. The bosses accommodated the shop crew's theatrical ambitions with a liberal policy about time off. Things were always slow on Wednesday afternoons, because so many of us would be off working matinees. You could always take a week off for a load-in, and then come back the following week. Some people left for months to do a tour, and then came back.

But the day to day work was dreary. We'd pull rental orders for traveling shows. We had to clean and test stage lights, bundle equipment, pack it in rolling crates, and then help load the trucks when they arrived to take it away.

When a rental order returned we'd have to count it in, check for damage. All the cable - thick black electrical cords - would be tangled in a giant mound, piled four feet high on the floor. It took all day to untangle the mess, coiling up each cable on a hand-wound crank, tying it neatly in two places with rough twine that smelled like burlap. The plugs on each end were marked with tape and magic marker and only harsh solvent could take that off. At the end of the day, I would be dirty, sweaty; hands black from the cable, the grimed adhesive from the tape, dessicated from the solvent.

After work, I sometimes went for a beer at the Landmark Tavern on Eleventh, just across the street from the shop's loading dock. Those who worked a show left in time to make a 7:30 half-hour call. Me, I took the subway home to my apartment, beery and dazed, wondering what he was doing in Seattle. One night I found a blinking light on the answering machine. Was it him?

No - It was a message from a designer I'd met once and sent my resume to. He'd worked with a friend of a friend. Would I be interested in a Master Electrician job? The show started in February, after a month of set-up. It would play the eastern half of the country the first six months, and then the western half. It was a good job - better money than I made now. Only I would have to leave New York.

And these New York streets. I would no longer see the phantom of my lost romance, lurking in every alley. I would no longer have to avoid Sophie.

I would have to give up my apartment, store my household belongings with my parents in New Jersey, fly to Florida for set-up. After that, I would spend a year on the road.

Living on a train. That's how the show traveled.

I decided to join the circus.

Reflective revealed

The item in my earlier photograph is one of the gauntlets that were part of the ice-show costume described in this previous post.

I thought I had lost it. I was surprised to find it in my mother's house. It must have come with a pile of stuff when I moved out of my New York apartment, to my parents' home in New Jersey and then, just like everything else, packed and shipped to Texas, some thirty years ago.


Here are the gauntlets, elbow-high with cuffs of magenta sequins and rhinestones. They are made of a kind of chain-mail, heavy and supple. One is turned so you can see the zipper on the underside of the wrist. They are so tiny I couldn't get my hand inside.



The skirt is a fall of strung bugle beads attached to a draped waist.

Beneath the skirt, flesh-colored chiffon panties glitter with individually sewn beads.


Here's a headdress crest - I don't have the thing it attaches to. It's hard to tell whether it goes across the head or whether it works like a Mohawk haircut, front to back.


Here's a detail of the crest and its applied decorative glitter. Bit of glitter are glued into the feathers, too.


I was unable to get a good overall photo of the bra with its silver paillettes, but here is a shot of the inside of the garment - the flesh-colored bra is structural. The decorative cover overlays it, fastening separately, so that it doesn't take the strain from the skater's movements.


All the hardware is heavy-duty, and sewn on strongly by hand. The elastic is reinforced by a criss-cross stitching. It's interesting to see how sturdy these fantastic things had to be, in order to work during a show.


The piece is fragile, the weight of the beading pulls at the skirt's delicate chiffon underbody, easily tearing it. I would be frightened to try to put it on.

I had already accepted the loss of my ice show costume long ago, so finding it again was both nostalgic and meaningless to me. It remained behind, and will be sold with the other items at my mom's house later this spring. If someone really wants to buy it, email me and I will provide contact info for the sale.

The day the Circus came to town

Yesterday was a day for chores. We gathered up old things, we sorted through the disheveled bookcases, and we sorted things into piles - trash, recycling, and give-to-Goodwill.

The Goodwill drop-off station is in the Valley, in a funny vacant lot in the midst of the shopping malls. In past years, a Halloween haunted house has been contructed here; at other times it has been fenced off and deserted.

Today we pulled in near the Goodwill trailer, and we saw something different.The fence to the lot behind the Goodwill trailer was open, and there it was - the Big Top.

A real circus tent. It was Circus Vargas. Circus Vargas started in California in the 1960s and is one of the biggest - and only - American tent shows touring the US today.

While [The Man I Love] unloaded all our Goodwill donations, I walked up there and talked to the woman in the ticket office. Behind us, you could hear the sounds of the show going on in the tent.

They were on a two-week stand. Tomorrow was the last day. The next show today was at 4:30.

"Can we go to the circus?" I asked [The Man I Love] when I rejoined him at the Goodwill trailer.

Because [The Man I Love] loves me, he agreed. We did our errands, and came back to the lot at 4:10 and bought tickets.

We went through the turnstile and checked out the "Midway" - or, rather, the trailer with the food concession. We got some popcorn and drinks.

This is the entrance into the tent. When you go in you find your seat in the curved, tiered seating area around a single circus ring. At the north end of the tent, a curtained portal is the performers' entry.

As audience slowly filed in, we awaited the show's beginning.

It was a kick to be back at the circus again. In 1978, I worked for the Big Apple Circus, which held its second season in a tent just like this one, in a parking lot on 8th Avenue at 50th Street.

We watched the warm-up where a juggler taught kids balancing tricks. Vendors roamed the aisles selling popcorn, cotton candy, and blinking colored light-up toys. Then the roustabouts unrolled a red carpet on the asphalt surface of the center ring, and the show began.

The show starts with a dance and parade featuring all of today's performers. For circus folks, this is called the "Spec", short for "spectacular."

Circus Vargas's show includes a trampoline act, a juggling act, and a dare-devil motor-bike act. There's a clown, and a snake-handling act.

If you go to a circus, you can tell a lot about what will be in the show by looking up at the rigging. All the apparatus is hung above. The trapeze act's equipment is obvious, but even some floor-based acts have equipment that is stored in the air, so that it can be lowered in the dark for the roustabouts to set up quickly. I could see a ring for an aerial act, and also that there would be a "Spanish web" act.

A Spanish web is a thick rope covered with canvas. An aerialist can wrap the rope around her limbs and use the friction of the rope to ascend, descend, or stay held in space by the tension of the rope. Some web acts have a ground-person who spins the rope so that the centrifugal force flings the performer out in the air, anchored to the web by a wrist loop.

Circus Vargas used a variation on the canvas-covered rope, a double length of silk fabric the aerialists twined about them, forming ever-changing harnesses and baskets to hold them in the air.

It looks spectacular, but it's actually pretty easy to do simple "web" tricks. This one was pretty good, though.


There are two animal acts - one with a horse, and a Dog Act. And cats.

Now, to circus folks, a Cat Act is what you call any act with tigers, lions, or other big cats. What was unusual about this act was that it was a Dog Act with cats. House cats.

After The Big Apple, when I went on to Ringling's Monte Carlo Unit, that show had a tiger act. If you work for a show with a cat act, you get used to the smell of tiger pee.

Tigers can shoot pee some ten or twenty feet. You don't want to get hit by a hot stream of tiger pee. Circus folks know to move out of the way when they see those tails rise up!

So when the beautiful, fluffy white house-cat, trained to leap over a small black dog, turned his backside to our section of seats, and lifted his tail, I got a little frisson of that feeling. But of course it passed. House cats are way different than tigers.

Tigers are easier to train.

The audience applauded enthusiastically at everything. Children were enthralled with entertainment like this, so different from television or movies. Little girls watched the aerialist spinning on her ring in the air as if she were magic. Some of the performers were even little girls - which made it all more magic to know that kids could do this, too!

But there we were, two grownups. I'd like to say we enjoyed the rest of the show, but as it turned out, we didn't stay for the second act, even though it featured the Flying Tabares family's trapeze act. The evening was growing colder and colder, and we hadn't brought jackets - having left the house just to run errands. We were freezing!

At the Big Apple, I had been in charge of lighting. Sitting there in the tent, smelling the popcorn and the peculiar smell of vinyl and canvas, I remembered again how I had been always listening for the sound of the generator running. Back then, diesel generators were dirty and noisy, and took a lot of tending to keep the electricity going. An unexpected lighting problem during a tumbling or juggling is very dangerous for the performers. During a show there was always a sense of watchfulness about it.

Like my reaction to seeing that cat raise its tail, I couldn't help having that wary feeling. The lights, the smells, the sounds put me back on the job.

When the lights went up for Intermission, the roustabouts started hoisting the safety net for the Trap Act. I caught myself checking out what knot one of the riggers was using to tie off his line.

Can you ever leave show business behind?

Circus Vargas performs the last shows of its Canoga Park run tomorrow, Monday December 15. They are located just off Topanga Canyon Boulevard, south of Victory Boulevard. I wish them a good stand. A fierce winter storm is predicted for the Los Angeles area tonight and tomorrow. I hope the Big Top withstands the winds.

Sonja Henie's Ice Show costume

Sonja Henie, skating with John Walsh, American figure skater. Mr. Walsh died on November 2, 2007, aged 85. Photo: Walsh family from the Boston Globe.

In 1979, a stagehand in Chicago gave me a costume from Sonja Henie's Ice Show. His mother had been a dresser on the show and had kept the costume. He was a Local #2 guy, running spotlight at the International Amphitheatre, on the South Side. I worked for the circus, and was running electrics and calling spots for the show.

I don't know why he decided to give it to me. I was not even a union sister at the time - that came later, in the '80's. But he was an older man who lived alone and his mother had just passed, and I was a nice girl who worked for the circus. I suppose he thought I'd appreciate it.

I did. I truly did. It was incredible. There was a magnificent pink and silver sparkly headdress, and then there was a bra and a kind of sarong-like thing that was worn about the waist. You could tell that the three pieces weren't part of the same costume - the headdress was sequinned, but the bra and sarong were flesh-colored netting sewn with rectangular-shaped silver spangles - is that what they call paillettes? There were also these wonderful sequinned gauntlets - things that fit over your arms like long gloves without fingers - there was an elastic loop that fit over your middle finger.

Even then - I was 24 - the sarong and bra were too small for me. I could have worn the headdress - if I were a hat person, but I'm not. I really had no use for this gift. But I carried it around with me for many, many years - he'd packed it in this odd cubically shaped cardboard box that was awkward to store, so I am telling the truth that I really did make an effort to hold onto it.

At some point in my hectic life, my Sonja Henie Ice Show costume disappeared - it fell away from me, like many other things.

The art deco place settings found on Canal Street that I shipped from New York to Seattle - I packed them carelessly, and they broke in transit.

The Heywood-Wakefield dining room set I bought on Canal Street for $100. It was too bulky to move from apartment to apartment.

The amazing gilt Eastlake-style mirror I found on the street and restored. Did I leave that at my parents' house before moving West?

The fantastic '50's printed circle skirt I found at a vintage shop - it was too wide for my waist - damn, it would fit me perfectly today!!!

The vintage 1952 Hawaiian shirt depicting a pre-Space Needle Seattle - unwisely, I dry-cleaned it too many times, and it crumbled away.

The antique kimono, left at a hotel while on the road.

All gone.

What are the lost, precious things you remember from your lives?

First of May

To circus people, "First of May" means a newbie, a rookie, a newcomer. It's what they called the young kids who ran away from home and joined up as roustabouts as the circus moved around the country after coming out of Winter Quarters - if you called a kid a "First of May" it meant you thought he'd be so disenchanted with circus life that he'd be gone before the first of May.

Did I ever tell you about when I worked for the circus?

Oh, that's right, I guess I did.

When I worked for the circus, I didn't think I was a "First of May." I joined Ringling's Monte Carlo Unit after working a summer for the Big Apple Circus. Plus, I worked in the theatre. So I didn't think I was new to show-biz when I decided to fly to Venice, Florida, and work as the lighting technician for a new, innovative single-ring European-style circus that Ringling was rolling out.

But, in fact, I did have a lot to learn. I learned how to sleep on a train. I learned how to keep stuff in my train compartment from falling down during rough travel. I learned how to drink slivovitz on travel days with a family of Bulgarian teeterboard artists who bunked in the train car next to mine.

I managed to stay out of the clutches of our French ringmaster, and a Spanish slack-wire performer, even though they were pretty darn cute, and flattered me by flirting shamelessly with me in their ever-so-romantic accents.

And I learned that circus people will voluntarily help herd an escaped tiger back to its cage, but if a chimpanzee gets loose, they'll leave the premises because chimps are "stronger and meaner than you with teeth This Big!"

I adopted my first dog while I was on the show, from the Detroit animal shelter, and instead of house training him, I had to "arena train" and "train train" him. When I ran out of dog food and couldn't get to the store, the animal crew gave me tiger-cub food for my puppy - packed in chubs like Jimmy Dean sausage.

I called spotlights for the show, and on our two-week stay I got to know the guys from Local #2 IATSE at the International Arena in Chicago pretty well. They took me to the track on our day off and taught me how to bet on the horses.

We opened in Hartford, Connecticut on a cold February day. At the time, I didn't know the significance of Hartford to the circus, but you can Google it and find out.

We travelled all over the US east of the Mississippi. The plan was to play the eastern half of the nation in the first 6 months, and then play the west during the later part of the year.

But the show didn't sell. So in June, the train rolled back into Venice, back to Quarters, and we closed. And I went back to New York, and back to the theatre again.

I took my dog with me. His name was Trouper, and for 16 years he lived up to his name.