Back From the Dead
Saturday, May 31, 2008 at 09:40PM Dateline: somewhere over Montana, probably
Miss me?
Yeah, I know. If any of the bloggers I read were to go this long between posts, I’d stop checking. What follows is a very abbreviated accounting of what went on during the interval and the occasion of my return.
First and foremost, this blog was created in order to chronicle the adventures of a working clown on the road. Unfortunately, the last 6-months haven’t involved much traveling to bring comedy to the masses. In fact—thanks I suppose to the current recession—there hasn’t been nearly enough work at all. Two different trips to China (about which I had hoped to blog) were cancelled due to acts of God, and what few gigs I managed to pick up would hardly elicit much excitement. It’s true, there was the drama of bringing every piece of gear I own except my stilts to a gig where I needed ONLY my stilts. But I doubt most of you would be too interested in how Cheryl Shruffer rode in on horseback, wearing a cape, and saved me from professional black-listing with a loan of the missing item.
The notable exception to this artistic drought was the two-week off-Broadway run of Bambouk: bald comedy, in tails. that took place in late April and early May. While hugely important in the arc of my professional career, it doesn’t—properly speaking—belong in a travel blog, as it went down less than 10 miles from my apartment. Still, there were enough peaks and valleys in the course of putting up the production to justify its own blog. There was the drama of booking a theatre and later having our contract cancelled (in favor of a bigger show) and the subsequent move to a larger space. There was the fiasco of misprinted t-shirts and a stolen camera. Over the course of two weeks we learned a lot about our show, New York audiences, and how we are not the marketing geniuses we had hoped to be. Much good came from the experience, none of it financial. Video from the show is currently being compiled into promotional material. A rough draft of it can be seen here:
I would be remiss in not pointing out the dramatic changes in my personal life that occurred in the past 6-months. Over the Christmas holidays I managed to secure the lease on a studio apartment in the Bronx. This is remarkable because I hadn’t been on a lease since ’03, and my rental history had more-or-less evaporated. I had lived there nary 3 months when Kari agreed to move in with me. The gods had somehow conspired to stabilize both my love life and living situation in one fell swoop.
That said, perhaps you’re wondering what finally got me off my duff and back to this blog. It’s simple: I’m writing this from a plane en route to Kodiak, Alaska where I’m going to spend the next two weeks working with my old friend Peter at a circus camp; and, so, as this constitutes travel for the purposes of art/work/education/commerce I felt remiss in not keeping you posted. For the record, I taught here last year with Brian, before this blog began. With any luck, these kids will provide fodder for stories. Or perhaps I’ll be attacked by a bear . . . though you’d probably hear about that on the news and not here.
In completely unrelated news, I’ve been listening to Stravinksy’s “L’histoire du soldat” after hearing it on the radio for the first time the other day. I don’t know how I got to be this old without discovering it before now, but it’s awesome. If you find you’re similarly unaware of it, I recommend downloading it.
Reader Comments (1)
It's good to hear from you Matthew even if it's not all entirely great news- Your blog is in my Google Reader RSS feed.
Enjoy Alaska!
'Garshz