Aragh. Urgh. Okay. Here's a typical conversation between me and my brain, these post-Showcase days:
Me: I want to perform! Why am I not performing? I could so perform right this second! Grr! Argh!
And then the lovely, talented, and extremely motivated Marsha forwarded me along to a fellow over at yon Supper Club, asking me to perform tonight and tomorrow night.
So I went for it, right? Well, actually...
Me: Whoa, tonight? Tonight's not good. Neither is tomorrow. No. Tomorrow is not good, either. I don't have a costume--that is, the Showcase costume is a little fall-y apart-y And I have a new costume that I haven't quite (cough!) tried out on the trapeze yet...and the new stuff isn't smooth, yet I don't want to go back to just the old stuff. And that toe hang is SO not there yet. Oh, geez, and I don't even have the right length music anymore. No. Tonight is not good...
Ah, now I see: this is what they call eating your words.
I realize two important things: one, these gigs come up very last-second (there was another one last weekend, which I genuinely couldn't do because I was scheduled to be at work). And two, I work very well on a deadline, and there is no deadline in sight. Left to my own devices, I could probably putter around my act indefinitely and tweak this and fix that and add this and find a better costume...and never actually be "ready" to perform my act, much less at the drop of a hat. In fact, this would be the easiest thing in the world to do. (And now I think I have some insight into these perplexing people at Circus Center, who are immensely talented and should really be performing somewhere...but aren't.)
It would be very easy--the kind of comfortable trap that I would fall into and never kick myself out of. Because the world outside Circus Center is harsh and uninviting, and that's the world I have to go into if my act is ever to see the light of day, much less (looking at the big picture) the lights of a real, flesh-and-blood circus.
So! I'm making my own damn deadline: my act will be ready to roll out at a moment's notice by August 31st. That is the first day of the fall semester at Circus Center; it is also a full two months, plus change, after the Showcase: even given that I'm missing a week for my cousin's wedding, this should be ample time for me to get my ducks in a row. If I don't have a new costume by then, or that stupid, stupid toe hang isn't where it belongs, that's just too bad. I will at least have a contingency plan: the point is that I will be ready.
I will also work on my spontaneity/willingness to drop things in favor of going out and performing. Also organization: I'm not entirely sure where my makeup bag is right now, and that would probably be handy.
I heartily invite you, friends, to hold me to it. If, come mid-August,
I'm making noises about it being "too soon" and I'm "not ready," you
are free to scold me, or heckle me, or draw me pictures of your
profound disappointment. I.e.,
I probably don't know all of you reading this, but I would never want to cause you that kind of pain.
Let's do this.
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*Yesterday, during my lesson with Marina, she cheerfully announced that
I should also think about finding a place for a heel hang in my act.
My heels are, if anything, more sketchy than my toes, which means I get
to go through this whole process of "it's so close but it's not quite
there" for another skill. And after that? Yep: it'll be neck hang.
**This is surely my greatest work of art to date. Like I even needed to tell you that.
I think I had a dream in which I posted this video to this blog. It's entirely possible, because I have really, intensely boring dreams. (Like, the whole dream will be packing a suitcase to go on a trip, for what feels like HOURS, but I never actually go on the trip.)
Anyway, I didn't post it, but here it is now. This is the dress rehearsal, since although there were a plethora of videographers/photographers around the Showcase, I've yet to see any of their footage. This was shot by the marvelous Marsha:
So, that was June 17th. In the almost-a-month since then, Marina and I have been plotting to make the act longer and fancier. The goal is to have four and a half minutes, and to throw in a bunch of new skills, some of which I have pining to learn for months (like extending your front leg in unicorn). Here's what I've got as of this weekend:
Not bad, for three weeks. I had thought that lengthening an act would take as much time as making it in the first place, especially if I'm lengthening it by 50%. I was wrong: as you can see, and as I was very surprised to learn, I am at the stated goal of 4 1/2 minutes.
But it's not like the act is done. What you see above is the
first time I ran it through from beginning to end with all the new
material--and even then, some of the new material is conspicuously
absent...like the toe hang. I still need to run it another 100,000
times before it's smooth and polished and I don't get my legs confused
when I'm standing on the bar (or at any other time, actually). And
that toe hang...lordy. Technically, I can do it without safety ropes, though I
still use them when I'm training on my own (in class with Marina, I use
her spotting reflexes, though so far I haven't had to use them). Now
it's more of a mental undertaking than a physical one: in spite of
repeated bashings, the tops of my feet still feel like toe hangs go
beyond the
call of duty. Whine, whine, whine, that's all I ever hear.
In hindsight, my wrist might have been sending me a warning sign when, for the past three weeks, it hurt every time I put weight on it. Possibly that was not something I should have ignored.
But, in my defense, putting weight on a flexed wrist (like the top part of a push up) is very different from holding a trapeze bar, a rope, or basically any part of a hoop. As far as my (limited, mostly apocryphal*) knowledge of anatomy goes, my hand should not have freaked the heck out during hoop class on Friday night merely because I pulled up on the top part of the hoop. But there you go. Color me bewildered.
So I took about five days off to deal with the fact that my right hand seized in pain whenever confronted with such everyday objects as doorknobs and sink handles, much less trapezes, and to try to figure out if I could train myself to write with my left hand (answer: not legibly, not in five days). I have basically no idea what I did to it or what's happening under the skin, but it never swelled. Since swelling is my only red flag to go to the doctor--barring such subtle indicators as major blood loss or loss of limb--I have not gone to the doctor. The doctor would probably tell me to quit monkeying around on trapezes. Therefore I have resigned myself to living in ignorance.
Five days felt like an extremely long break, especially since I haven't quite gotten to the end of my post-Showcase high, so last night I went back to hoop. I only irritated it a couple of times--and it was for a really cool new skill, which I feel should balance it out. (My wrist feels otherwise.) It helps that I just now discovered the power of two incredibly simple things: tape and icy hot. Taping my wrist makes it roughly 100% less tweakable than it would be without (possibly because I can't flex or twist my wrist significantly). And icy hot is friggin amazing. I have no idea how some menthol has given my wrist full, painless range of motion mere hours after I made it angry by hanging from a hoop. Magic, probably.
After being nice to it and judiciously applying magical icy hot, my wrist is more or less functional, although pens continue to thwart me. I'm realizing, however, that this may be one of those things that never actually goes away: my right wrist, after all, is both my dominant wrist on trapeze, and the hand that uses the mouse/track pad and all of that carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing stuff. It gets the worst of all possible worlds.
I'm now making a concerted effort to use my left hand more for trapeze, but I'm also reconciling myself to the fact that I may have a cranky wrist for a good long time. And as with any injury, I have been given many opportunities to reflect on the marvelous fragility and complexity of the human body. You only get one. I mean, I do have another wrist, in this particular case, but it can't write its way out of a paper bag, so I had better start taking good care of the right one. I have a long career of awesomeness ahead of me (if I may freely toot my own horn), and how am I going to accept all those congratulatory hand shakes and high-fives with my left hand? Now you see the full extent of the problem.
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*So excited that I got to use "apocryphal" in a sentence.
