1 post tagged “drawing”
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.
--
*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.
