47 posts tagged “circus school”

Oh!  I am kind of behind the times, but I have a show coming up this Saturday.

Yeah, like this Saturday.  Like, I'm not on top of things right now.

Open House time!

It all goes down on Saturday, December 19th, over at Ye Circus Center in San Francisco.

Fun stuff begins at 10am--face painting, balloon animals, circus workshops and lots and lots of kid activities.  Most of it is free.  The flying trapeze net will be up: last year they had a sweet $5-per-swing deal going on, and I think something similar is happening this year.

Then the net comes down and the free show starts at 2:15 (runs until 3:00).  It'll be short and sweet, and I got excited just looking at the roster.  Lots of great acts!  ...And also me!

There is also a not-free show that night at 7:30, courtesy of the Professional Program and the Clown Conservatory.  These shows are generally amazing.  Tickets may be purchased here.

If you are in San Francisco or the Bay Area or the Pacific Time Zone, you should come.  What are you doing on Saturday?  If your answer doesn't include "balloon animals" you are obviously not going to have as much fun there as you'll have here.  Balloon animals.

Oh.  Hello, friends.  Yes, it has been awhile, hasn't it?  It's not even September anymore.

Much as I would like to tell you that I have spent the past month in a delirium of performance opportunities and have been far too busy to write, that is not the case.  My inner pessimist was telling me that as soon as my act, costume, and music were performance-ready, I would find no performance opportunities...and she was right.  Well played, pessimist.

In the midst of this resounding silence, I have been slogging along.  Slogging.  IT HAS BEEN BAD TIMES, FRIENDS.

First, I once again have no teacher: I encourage everyone to go see Marina perform at Teatro ZInzanni and tell her to come back and teach.*  With no one to boss me around, I am bored with my act.  Circus is failing to entertain me.  The gym seems ridiculously crowded this semester; at this point, if I see twenty-five people running around in there, I am likely to go walk in the park instead.  I feel jaded.  The fact that San Francisco has entered its fleeting, irrational summer does not help: chilly, gloomy gym versus a sunny beach and a book of pirate stories?**  Pirates always win.

I have another problem, too.  Even if there were performance opportunities being thrown at me, I've recently realized that performing for free is bad news for other aerialists.  Essentially, no one gets paid when people offer to perform for free (the fact that performers who require payment generally have much better acts does not slow down event organizers as much as you might think).  This was news to me, though it shouldn't have been: when I was being trained as a yoga teacher, we were cautioned never to teach for free for this exact reason.  My act is not to the same level as those who (rightly) ask to be paid, meaning that I don't feel right asking.  So.  Problematic.  Theoretically problematic, given the dearth of performance opportunities--but still problematic.

So all of these things get rolled up into a ball and the end result is that my love for the circus is unremitting, but my desire to perform is no longer consuming.  I feel like I have a better grasp all the time of what it would actually take to be employable by a real, honest-to-god circus, and I do not currently possess those things, nor the desire to possess them.  Furthermore, if I don't take a step back, now, then I run the risk of becoming seriously and irrevocably jaded.

It's difficult to describe, but realizing that I am not on a long, narrow road to performance stardom is actually a relief.  It's a scary relief, but still.  I'm fine with just showing up to the gym when I want to and using what space is available.  If this means--as it has more than once, lately--that I carve out a space behind the trampoline and stretch for an hour, so be it.  If I can hang Trappy, I can play with different music in my act--or different choreography, or fooling around on static trapeze or hoop instead.  Hey, remember when circus was "fun"?  I remember those days.  Those were good days.

Sure, if someone offers me a fantastic paying gig next weekend, I'll take it.  Watch, maybe it'll happen: maybe I just had to take a step back.  My inner pessimist can't win them all.

--
*Further proof that not everyone is caught up in a performance drought: Marsha recently took her admirable act to Supper Club and was nice enough to provide video for those not lucky enough to be there.  Dig the purple lights!
**Fast Ships, Black Sails, edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer--highly recommended, especially with the addition of a beach and/or ocean.

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.,

Why? **

Let's do this.

--
*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.

My goodness.  So many new things to report.  Let's make a list.

#1: I have a new teacher.  Another new teacher.  She is Marina, and she also teaches the hoop class, and over the course of two lessons she's thought of a number of clever things for me to do to my act, to make it shinier.  There was some complicated bureaucratic business that meant Gretchen couldn't teach me anymore--which is sad--but she's nice enough to let me continue using her trapeze.  (Another trapezist recently petted this trapeze and exclaimed "it's like riding in a Cadillac!"  Indeed it is; the corners and ropes are covered in hand-sewn leather.  I'm sometimes tempted to curl up and go to sleep on it.)  I feel as though I just need a set of eyes to look at my act and tell me whether or not I look like an idiot.  If it could be the same set of eyes for more than two weeks running, that might be helpful, too.  But I'm secretly pleased to be getting so much good advice from such a variety of teachers.

#2: Last weekend was the second-ever Works In Progress Showing (better known as WIPS), and here is what I showed...

Compared to last month, the observant viewer will note that there is a fancy new swinging section near the beginning (which means that my act requires an obnoxious number of crash pads) and that I did not do that stupid thing where I slide the wrong way out of the back balance at the end and wind up in crucifix.  (There is also no meat hook at the end, because I've pulled a small muscle in my ribs that hurts all out of proportion to its size whenever I do a meat hook or skin the cat.)

We did the feedback differently: last month, we all sat down on the floor and talked about it until the poor cleaning staff (who were waiting for us to leave so they could go enjoy their Sunday evening) threw us out.  This month, in the interest of time, we all wrote down our feedback and handed it in to the artists afterward.  Little known fact: people say different things in print, especially when their notes are anonymous, then they do when they're having a chat.  Sometimes these things are slightly incoherent (I know it made sense in their heads when they wrote it...).  And some of them don't come out sounding like they meant to, I'm sure.

My personal favorite: "get your hair out of your face."  What are you, my MOM?  (Hi Mom.)

But most of the feedback was fairly predictable: straighten your legs; nice music (how could you not love Zoe Keating?), and good match between the music and the style of the piece.  Nothing earth-shattering, but all useful.  If you, beloved readers, have anything to add, the comments are at your disposal.  The internet is also a fine place for gathering anonymous, semi-coherent feedback.

#3: There's this thing at Circus Center every summer called the Showcase (or the Student Showcase, or the June Showcase).  It's a show for students of Circus Center, as well as for the Youth Circus program.  Audition notices were posted awhile back, informing those interested to turn in a video and application.  It concluded with the enigmatic words "Auditions will be held in mid-April." 

Today, you may note, is the 24th, but if auditions are happening, I haven't been invited.  This is the sort of thing that generates a deal of paranoia--wait, am I the only one who hasn't been contacted for an audition or is everyone else in the same boat?-- and I've had several conversations with my peers this past week, in which we monger each other's rumors.  Have they already picked their performers?  Is there going to be a physical audition or is it just the video?  (Had I thought that the video was all there was, I would definitely have filmed it seven or eight more times to get the best possible version.  But at least the one I turned in is an honest sample.)  Have you heard anything?  No, I haven't heard anything either, and neither has my friend.

To the best of my knowledge-- which, I'll be the first to admit, is not very good--they have not yet chosen their acts.  Cross your fingers for me.

#4: I have hoop video!  I do not have edited hoop video!  Rather than punish you with four thirty-second clips, all of which begin with me frowning at my (brand-spanking new!) video camera as I sort out whether or not it's recording, I will instead spend some quality time with iMovie this weekend and post it next week.  Stay tuned...

This semester I'm taking a hoop class: not this kind of hoop, or this kind (though those are also cool), but  aerial hoop-- also known (in the grand aerial tradition of never calling anything by the same name twice) as aerial ring, cerceau, and lyra.

Like this:

I've seen more great hoop acts than I can count (for real) and I've wanted to try it out ever since I saw it on the schedule at Circus Center.  This term, it's my goal to go in and train six days a week, and I figure it'll be a good mental exercise to hop on something that's not a trapeze on one of those days.

In some ways, a hoop is just a giant, curving trapeze that doesn't have ropes where you expect there to be ropes.  (I say this as a trapezist; hoop people almost certainly feel that a trapeze is just a hoop, three quarters of which has been removed and the remainder of which has been pointlessly flattened.)  As a mental exercise, getting on a hoop was instantly successful: every time I reached across and my hand encountered bar, I went "hey!  that was supposed to be a rope right there!"  Or, for that matter, whenever I reached above myself and found-- yes!-- more gently curving metal bar... friends, it blew my mind.

Marina, the teacher, said that student unaccustomed to working with a single-point apparatus tend to find its wobbliness the biggest difference from, say, static trapeze.  Since I'm used to a wobbly, spinning trapeze that's not such an issue-- although I have to say that since the hoop we were using is literally only connected by a single point at the top of the hoop, it has all kinds of wobbliness that I'd never thought about.  If you reach up and pull down on one side, the other side rotates upward.  (There are hoops that are organized more like a single point trapeze, with two points attaching to the top, and Marina says these are more stable.)

Marina started me off by teaching me the hoop equivalents of a lot of basic trapeze moves.  These were basically the same, and not at all hard especially when we switched out the hoop that was up and gave me a slightly smaller one.  We all grumble when the static trapezes are changed out and the bar becomes narrow/wider/thicker/thinner/differently roped, but there's really not that much difference in what it allows you to do (or prohibits you from doing).  Having a slightly smaller hoop, on the other hand, made a BIG difference to my dinky little arms-- I didn't feel like the other side of the hoop was miles away.  This is a comforting feeling.

From there, we kept going with more and different skills: some are trapeze equivalents (fish/mermaid, gazelle, monkeyroll) and some are special for hoop (the "man in the moon" position is surprisingly comfortable).  What I found interesting-- because I'm a geek-- is that some things became much easier on hoop because of the curvature: I haven't been able to do pinwheels on a trapeze to save my life, but I got it right away on hoop with Marina spotting me.  Any skill that involves hanging from and/or balancing on the hoop is easier, whether it's be heels, toes, a back balance, a front balance-- because the hoop is cradling you just a little.

And then some things become harder.  It's hard to start a good spin in the way I usually do on trapeze (i.e., holding on with one hand from the bottom of the hoop), because a hoop is much heavier.  I didn't appreciate this until I had to get it moving.  The flip side, of course, is that once you get your spin, it'll keep going forever.  You know what else is harder?  Hip circles.  I know, right?  I just figure them out on trapeze, only to go to an apparatus where they are damn near impossible.  I inderstand why, though I'm not sure I can explain it; basically, the same shape that makes it easy to pinwheel makes it very tricky to hip circle.  You would not even believe how riveting I find this.  I could talk about it all day.

Suffice to say that I had a lot of fun and that we covered a ton of ground over the course of an hour and a half (I was the only student, but there is someone else signed up; I'm happy either way).  By the end of class, Marina was talking about stringing skills together in a combination, which I love.  I even found myself plotting to start coming in and using the hoop on my own (in a month or so, once Marina feels assured that I won't kill myself on it) but for the short term I have to confine myself to trapeze.  Because last week, fliers appeared announcing that the June Showcase auditions are coming up in mid-April. 

Mid-April.  Let's all ponder how close to mid-April it already is.  Unless I'm mistaken, next weekend is mid-April.  Between now and then I have to come up with some video to submit to the (gulp) audition committee and then hopefully they'll let me come do it for them live.  While this is my chance to a) shine and b) reap the rewards of all that training... gee whiz, am I ever not looking forward to that audition.  And until then, hoop will have to be my once-a-week mind-blowing experiment.

Hello, friends.

My mom was telling me the other day that, since I'm so keen on this "writing" business, I should write a novel about being in a circus and/or circus school.  I tried to explain to her that, yes, while some of the time it's zany* fun-- learning amazing new skills, falling off of stuff, and watching interesting people do amazing things that you yourself will never learn how to do-- and that, yes, those parts would make for a very interesting novel, most of the time circus school (and, I strongly suspect, being in an actual circus) is all about showing up at the same time in the same place and doing the same things-- most of which are conditioning exercises-- and then doing them again the next day, slightly better-- but so slightly that you can't even tell that it's better until months have passed.**

Recently it's been a bit like that.

And I love it.

I love showing up every day and doing the same thing, even though most of those things are, somehow, conditioning exercises.  I love banging the same parts of my knees and ankles on the same parts of the bar, and grunting at the same people who are also there at the same time, week in and week out, as we cross paths in the hall.  The only thing that could possibly make it better is if there was a big crowd of people applauding me for doing these same things every day-- and look!  That's my goal!

However, it doesn't make for very exciting blogging.  So you will, perhaps, be happy to hear that this week marks the beginning of the new semester.  Now I have a brand new teacher (Daniela having gone to Portland-- curse you, Portland, stealing my teacher!  I hope it rains on you, Portland!) who has assured me that she knows lots of conditioning exercises that will blow my mind and my abs, but I'm also signed up for my first hoop class.  It's been about a year since I've laid hands on anything that's not a trapeze, so I hope it will be enlightening.

It'll also break up the monotony, but that's all right.  There's plenty more monotony where that came from.

Hooray!

--

*Fun fact: "zany" is my least favorite word in the English language.  I'm not really sure why.  Makes me twitch.
**Another fun fact: if any publishing agents happen to be reading this blog, by no means is that sentence a writing sample.  Also: please publish my novel.

Hey, what do you know!  The 18,000th try really is the charm.  The sound, sadly, was apparently a casualty of my War To Get My Video On YouTube.  Only the strong survived (and the music wasn't super audible in the first place).  I encourage you to hum the tune of your choice as you watch:

I don't want to jinx it or anything, but I've been on fire for the past two weeks.  Every time I show up to practice or class, I've been figuring out something new.  I'm guessing that everybody hits phases like this in their training, and that it's temporary, but that doesn't make it any less awesome.

So my practice ("training") and class times since my last entry have looked like this:

Friday (1/23): first hip circle without Daniela's assistance
Saturday: first time beating straight into a Russian Roll (I'd been doing this dorky mini-beat thing before)
Sunday: first back balance on my own
Tuesday: first time doing this hideous dolphin/flip to stand thing that freaks me out
Wednesday: I held meat hook on my left side for the first time (for a split second...)
Friday: nothin'.  Rested on my laurels.
Saturday: first semi-successful switch beat (finally-- that post is from September)
Sunday: first time getting out of shoulder stand the right way
Tuesday: Russian roll to ankles.  Piece of cake.
Yesterday: first time getting the hang of swinging on single point.

I realize most of this is meaningless to some of you reading this, but rest assured that I will have video clips soon.  And rest assured that even if it looks like so many words, they are accurate words, because I keep scrupulous notes.  For the past couple of weeks, they've been scrupulous notes full of exclamation points.

But, lest I get too cheery about my trapeze prospects, Daniela announced on Tuesday that she's packing her bags for Portland at the end of the semester (late March).

For Daniela's static students, this was sad news.  Daniela is a lovely person and an awesome teacher, but there are other awesome static teachers at Circus Center.  There aren't any other single-point teachers; in fact, it's not immediately clear that there's another single-point trapeze available once Daniela takes hers away.  So for her single-point students, like me, it's not only sad but semi-disastrous.

Luckily, Circus Center is nothing if not an oasis of resources, and Daniela has lots of ideas for people who can teach me and/or with whom I can consult.  None of them are single-point teachers per se, but some are senior students and others are very good at teaching other things.  It seems like I'll probably take static trapeze for technique and then borrow one of the senior students to get pointers on my act.  My biggest weakness is the acting side of things, so having someone who knows how to emote, even if they're not fluent in single-point, will be instructive.

That is to say, I can cover my bases in the short term, but I have this nagging feeling that whatever new situation I find won't be as amazing-- or as productive-- as the past year has been.  To put it another way: I'm in San Francisco because it's been the best place to do what I want to do (originally silks, now single-point trapeze).  If it's no longer the best place-- if the resident expert in my apparatus is gone-- there's no reason for me to be here.  I'm not tied down to anything here, so the smartest thing is to go wherever I can get the best instruction.

I discussed all of this with Daniela yesterday and she tossed around some ideas for other places where she knows of single point teachers/programs.  Not surprisingly, Portland was chief among them: there's no circus school in the sense of Circus Center, but some superficial googling gives me one aerial dance company (when they refer to "trapeze" at all, they mean single point-- that's refreshing) and one physical theater school.  If nothing else, I know Daniela will be there

I fully admit that, for me, the idea of going someplace new is always going to be more appealing than staying where I am.  It's never been my intention to settle in San Francisco, and this might prove to be as good a reason as any to jump ship.  (Besides, have you seen the price of housing in Portland?  I know my perspective is skewed by living in San Francisco if I think that renting a room for $350/month is crazy cheap, but... it's crazy cheap!)  Yes, looking for a new job in the current economy is... daunting?  let's go with daunting-- but running away with the circus doesn't permit the luxury of fear.  If I end up staying in San Francisco because I find a genuinely satisfying new teacher here, that's one thing; if I stay because I'm scared of having to find a new job, I'm being an idiot.  I can spend the rest of my life clinging to the illusion of security, but now is not the time.  (Did I ever mention that I have "carpe diem" tattooed on my chest?)

But now isn't the time to make snap decisions, either.  The Student Showcase is in June, and I've always thought of that as the time to pause and assess how far I've come, whether I can realistically expect to be performing (on a regular basis and preferably for pay) in this lifetime, etc.  If I pass the audition (touch wood-- no, all of you, go knock for me.  I can wait.) I'll have a good reason to be here in SF, trying out other non-Daniela resources.  If not, then I might be doing my assessing a bit sooner.  In the mean time, I have two months of Daniela time left, and I intend to use it fully.  Like my chest says, carpe diem.

Oh, hi.

I've been out of town from about Christmas to about last week.  I saw my family and my Texas people (hi people!) and basically did nothing for three weeks.  It was great.

And the morning after I landed in San Francisco, before my bags were properly unpacked, I was at Circus Center, because three weeks struck me as a rather long time to not be on a trapeze.  I did have an afternoon playing on the silks over at Blue Lapis Light, but that was only enough to remind me that silks are beautiful to watch and extremely difficult to execute.  And when it wasn't too cold, I sought out the nearest pull-up bar and hung from it... but that's not quite the same thing.

But I didn't forget everything about trapeze.  My straddle-ups might have fallen off a bit, but that's the worst of it.  Static class (this semester, with my friend Diane-- she of the Digital Camera and the Steady Hand) was uneventful, and single point class was a little wild.  Not only did Daniela announce that she'll have me doing heel hang without ropes (yikes) in two weeks (yikes yikes yikes), but I learned three new things.  The first two are hidden away on the internet by some other name, so you know what that means: time for confusing and anatomically incorrect stick figures!

Dolphin & shoulder stand

And on the right is something ambiguously called "shoulder stand."  At one point, I think I looked like this (but without the fancy hands and the good form), and at another point I ended up below the bar-- I know because I was looking at it-- but since Daniela didn't demo this for me, I'm fuzzy on the details.  Anyway, I like it: being upside down on one shoulder is something I've seen a lot and never played with, and I know there are a bunch of interesting variations.

Here's something else that I like:

These, friends, are hip circles. (And that is Angelica Bongiovonni again.)  Aren't they beautiful?  I can't say that I managed to do-- what was that?  eighteen?-- eighteen or whatever in a row, but I did do one whole one, and Daniela said that was impressive all by itself.  (To freely toot my own horn, her exact words were "I've never seen someone get that so fast."  Yesssssss!)

Hip circles make you dizzy in ways that I had not yet experienced on trapeze, but most of all they're fun.  I am determined that these will be happening in my act.

Here's something you might not notice in the video, though: holding the back of your knees is an important "safety feature" of the skill.  If you don't, you end up pivoting on your upper arms instead of behind your knees, leaving you with unsightly bruises.  For the next week, I'll be wincing whenever I put on a jacket.

And that means that the semester has officially begun.

The show went fine!  I only say "fine" because it didn't, like, knock the audience over with its amazing (that would be the act before mine... more on that later), but it's got an exclamation point because the people clapped!  and I didn't fall off!

When I say "the people," I mean "the zillions of people, many of whom were under the age of four."  It was a big crowd-- bigger, I think, than Circus Center was expecting, based on the number of bleachers they'd set up.  When I watched the show before mine I ended up standing off to the side, and all the little kids were herded onto the floor to make room on the bleachers.  It was the same deal for the Professional Program show that night-- standing room only.

The other acts were excellent: there were a few static trapeze numbers (including a cool piece put together by the Static 3 classes, using all three of the trapezes), some silks, a really cute hoop act starring twin sisters, and, um... this strap act.

Okay, so if you're not familiar with the concept, let me just say that it would be hard to even follow a bad strap act: it's a beautiful and impressive apparatus and it requires incredible strength.  But I came right after a good-- dare I even say great-- strap act.  At first I wondered why this guy wasn't in the Professional Program.  Then I began to wonder why he was even in a circus school and not in a circus.  The crowd ate him up.  Did it hurt that the guy was incredibly well-built and shirtless?  No.  No, I think that did not hurt.

Anyway, in spite of the fact that I experienced firsthand the origins of the phrase, "tough act to follow," I did fine.  For the rest of the day people from the audience and fellow students told me that it looked good, and I am pleased to have checked the box for "first ever performance."

But I want to do it again!  More!  I learned a lot from having an audience-- the time it takes for them to decide to clap, for instance, is about two seconds longer than what feels normal for me to hold a position (I figured this out by the end)-- and I know I could continue to learn from doing my act in front of them.  Or, as Daniela said, you have to practice performance just like everything else.  Unfortunately, my next obvious opportunity to perform is in June.  No doubt my act will be way way cool by then-- perhaps I will be a tough act to follow by then-- but June?  June is a very long time from now.  (And that's only if I pass the audition.)

Although I am, frankly, bummed that my one foreseeable performance opportunity has come and gone, I'm excited to see what Daniela has me doing when I come back in the new year.  Do we make a whole new act?  Keep refining this one?  What skills will she teach me?  This coming semester I'm not taking any classes off the regular schedule: my friend Diane and I are splitting a private lesson on static and I'm continuing privately with single point.  And my New Year's resolution is to practice more (five days a week to my current four-- who knows, maybe I can even work in a sixth day, now and then).  So stuff will keep getting better.

In the mean time, I'm going home to Texas for a few weeks, and I'm going to have to think of new and creative ways to condition.  There's a silks studio in Austin where I may get to spend some time, but otherwise it looks like its me and the track near my parents' house.  I run with the speed and grace of a penguin, but there are pull-up bars and sit-up stations and whatnot along the path.  How else am I going to keep my hands from de-callusing?  Sandpaper gloves?  Tune in to find out...