Three-Ring Circus

Posted September 07, 2007

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Sure, it's a little pretentious, like performance art always is -- the way he plucks the strings on his guitar in the moody half-dark of the candlelit room while she reads a dramatic sequence of verses about Spain. But there's something about the way they lean together, something about their chemistry and the classic power of The Story of Ferdinand the Bull, that is both strange and moving. Or maybe it's the way Ben looks poetically off into the middle distance while his friend Ava makes unflinching eye contact with each of us in turn. I'm not sure.

But I do know that it's unusual for me to fully enjoy one of the children's performances like this. In fact, if you could guarantee that the kids would never read this column, I might even say that I dread these events. "Kill me," I whispered to Michael from our seats in the audience tonight while Ben and Birdy finished their last preparations for the Circus of Circus, and he looked at me like I had suddenly turned into Jack Nicholson from The Shining. But really. Do I want to sit, for the indefinite duration of the show, scrunched into a tiny toddler play tent, even if this is the official VIP seating? No I do not.

But my comfort is not the only issue or even the main one. It's that the shows always grow so overwrought, like it's one of those reality backstage TV programs, and instead of the performance itself the whole thing's about the bickering and angst and thwarted dreams of stardom. I'm happy to watch a tightrope trick and a clown act and the skateboarding. It's all the related vexation I can live without: the frantic whispering ("Mama! Don't call me 'Ben'! While I'm seating you, you should call me 'Sir'!"), the frantic hunting down of props ("Mama! What do we have for a tightrope balance? Here, help me pull the handle off the carpet sweeper. Quick! Tug it harder!"), the frantic arguing ("Birdy you already did your skateboard act!" "No Ben! That was just practice!"). Truth be told, I'm also not so crazy about the way the skateboard act turns out to involve Birdy careening around the coffee table on a rolling xylophone.

And I appreciate the inadvertent humor of Birdy's clown shoes, I really do: she's wearing Ben's sneakers onto which he has rubberbanded two plastic golf balls -- plastic golf balls that pop off and must be rerubberbanded after every single step she takes -- the circus equivalent of doomed Sisyphus rolling that stone up the hill. But somehow even the shoes takes on a frantic, overwrought quality, since every event is shaped by Ben's hope that we in the audience will feel as if we are attending a real, actual circus. "Let me fix your shoes again," he whispers. He whispers, "Birdy, shush. A real clown wouldn't whine like that and say, 'Benny I don't want to wear the clown nose.' Just wear it. Now curtsy. Curtsy!" ("Circus Dictatorship," Michael whispers to me. "Film at 11.")

I am suddenly self-conscious about the fact that you're reading this with the glorious, inspiring banner "Wondertime" right across your screen -- reading this and thinking, "Why can't she appreciate her children's imagination? What is wrong with her?" And I'll tell you: there's plenty wrong with me. For one thing, because of my own struggles with patience, I cringe over Ben's similar struggles -- see them as a reflection of my own weaknesses as a person. But also it's my very own actual impatience that kicks in. I work so hard to live in the moment, to let the grace of this life, these children, wash over me. So much of the time I'm successful: I feel blessed, joyful, content. And then there are evenings like this one, where I can barely sit still, where my knee is literally jiggling around in its, to quote Birdy, kneehole. I catch myself wanting the performance to end so that I can put the children to bed so that I can get back to working on the advent calendar I'm making for them so that I can give it to them tomorrow and make them happy, which is why I'm snapping at them now to finish up their circus. What? A total back-ass-wards paradox? Oh. Oops.

Because as soon as I get back to wrapping up the little matchboxes in fancy paper, what do you know? I miss the kids.

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Three-Ring Circus

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by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Three-Ring Circus

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