Most eventful weekend..
This third weekend juggling was filled with excitement.. In what turned out to be a fateful decision, I brought along a clown nose I own. I wore it in the car on the way to Six Flags. (Harper and I had done this on our way to Colorado last Thanksgiving..great fun). This girl on a school bus waved at me and I waved back, and we ended up behind the bus. The back of the bus was full of teenage girls and they were all waving and stuff..one of them put on a train conductor-style hat and some sunglasses..etc.. She held up her finger, and I at first thought it was a “wait a minute” gesture, but then she held up a bunch more fingers. Brian, driving the car, said “They’re giving us a phone number.” In a few moments they produced paper with a phone number on it and held it up to the window…Brian, Ragnar and I were a little weirded out.. The girl held up a cell phone, and there was lots of motioning that I didn’t really understand until another paper saying “Who doesn’t have a cell phone?” was held up, and all the girls produced cell phones. Ragnar mentioned that he had a cell phone, but we decided that this was best kept to ourselves..the girls were ostensibly a high school volleyball team, and therefore Off Limits to Brian and me, and Ragnar (the one of us in high school) did not wish to talk to them. Around this time a car pulled in between us and the bus. A few minutes later, it changed lanes away. As this happened a second and third time, we realized they had made signs telling the other cars to get out of the way. Then they’d show us signs like “I missed you” and stuff. Again came a phone number sign, this time with a name.. A bit later a sign asking “Why you no like?” appeared.. Then the bus changed lanes and we decided to head on… Why didn’t this stuff happend to me when I was in high school?
We thought it would add to my outfit if I started the show wearing the clown nose. (My outfit consists of black pants, tight black shirt, red suspenders, a leather thing around my arm and a spike collar). Then, warming up about ten minutes before our first show, we had the brilliant idea of incorporating the clown nose into our balancing routine. What if I were balancing something on my face, and then Brian put the clown nose on me? We tried it with a knife, which proved too difficult, so we tried it with something easier: a pitchfork. As Brian started putting the nose on me, somehow the pitchfork fell and I didn’t quite manage to catch it before it hit me. Gave me a nice cut on my right eyebrow. I headed off to the bathroom, and then to first aid, where they told me I might need stitches. I convinced the first aid folk to hurry, and after they’d bandaged me a bit I ran back to the stage to start our show a few minutes late. After the show I returned to first aid to fill out some forms, and had great fun with some of them: “Please describe the incident…” The show went well, as did the rest of the evening.
Our stage is decorated with cheese cloth and rope stapled along the back wall. For the past 30 or 40 shows we’ve kept a candle burning on a counter at the back of the stage for easy quick torch lighting. Minutes before our first show on Saturday, after we’d already gathered an audience of a couple of dozen people, some of the cheese cloth seems to have blown into the candle with the wind.. So our stage caught fire. The cheese cloth went up very quickly, and the rope was fairly swift. The black cloth backing of our stage was well fireproofed, and didn’t cath at all. A couple of bursts from the fire extinguisher we keep handy put the fire out, and our audience cheered…they had not seemed the least bit scared during the fire. So we went ahead and did our show. We later told park workers about the incident, and apparently the whole stage was supposed to be fire proofed..we don’t know if it just doesn’t work that well on cheese cloth or what.. But they asked us not to do fire until this was taken care of.. Of course, this didn’t happen until after the show where a torch hit me in the face..no damage, just got ash on my nose.
What a weekend..
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