Circus Juventas 2013 Spring Celebration

I saw K’s first circus show for the year last night. I have such goodwill for these shows.

Circus Juventas is a performing youth circus arts school. The spring shows are the school’s recital. All performing classes perform, regardless of age or readiness. You get your costume on, you get your gear, and you get out there and you perform.

The school is so large that the student body is divided into three section, or color groups. Each color does three shows and one dress/tech rehearsal. Leading up to this there have been regular classes, extra practices, and emergency extra practices. Ready or not, now you go on.

Last night was the Yellow show. Over 400 youth performers, 150 parent volunteers doing rigging and lighting and backstage-wrangling and locker-room-supervision and photography. The Toddler and Kinder acts always go first; three- and four- and five-year-olds dressed as naval officers and pirates, doing their respective acts.

The show is long. Over three hours, with an intermission. Every year they try to make sure the younger kids are all in the first half, so they can leave at 8:30 and go home. It doesn’t always work, but they try. K is now an older kid, and is in the second half for all nine shows.

The show last night had no mishaps. Sure, the Ringmistresses flubbed a couple of lines, but they recovered. Sure, a few unicyclists fell off their bikes, but they got back on. Only one of the flyers made it back to the bar, but ALL of them made it to the catcher without mishap. The clowns were funny. The kids juggling clubs didn’t drop anything. The rigging didn’t jam.

As always, there were a few costume or music choices that made me raise a brow. But the kids performing have no control over those things. They are given a costume and a song and a routines, and they do their best. They smile, and style, and they commit to whatever thing they are required to do. They are game, and I love that about them.

K was very, very tired last night. We got home, and I reminded her she needed to take her makeup off. We stood in the bathroom at 10:50 last night, smearing gunk on her eyelids and wiping them off. I gave her a lot of hugs, and told her she did great.

She did. She did great.

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Paddy’s Not at Work Today

This weekend we found out that K is going to enter her Unicycle act on a trapezee suspended between two older students riding extremely tall (“giraffe”) unicycles. K will do various tricks as they unicycle around the floor, then dismount and move to join her class on her unicycle.

This is, frankly, kinda awesome.

However …

However, should one of the bases fall or slip or drop the trapeze bar, the flyer — my daughter, for instance — will go skidding to the ground. Whereupon the trapeze falls on her. Whereupon the bar falls on her.

If any of you have not heard the song “The Sick Note,” I urge you to listen to the following:

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Channeling Anna

J and I have a consensus, when we watch Downton Abbey. Namely, that Anna is the most socially adept, most emotionally aware, most etiquette-aware person on the show. Anna is fantastic. I wish I had Anna’s social skills. But I don’t.

Yet, sometimes, I can channel a wisp of Anna.

Yesterday I went to my daughter’s band recital. It was a “Band Room Concert,” a sort of mini-show the band does in March to get the kids used to the ritual of performing before their concert in May. I never get to make the May show, so I try to go to this one.

K’s band is a band for homeschool kids. The kids range in age from about ten to about fourteen, is my guess. And there is a vast variety of skill. The band performed four songs, three of which … lost their way, briefly, in the middles.

I had a moment of grace. I smiled fondly at this group of earnest, dedicated kids. These kids surrounded by their peers and friends and with their families watching (and recording). I felt certain I knew what Anna Bates would do.

It was a really fun concert. I admire those kids for all their work and commitment. When it was over I gave K a big hug and told her how very glad I was to have come to her concert.

Channeling Anna Bates. Everything I said was true.

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On skepticism and superpowers

Periodically my son will stop, and stare, and furrow his brow. Sometimes when I ask him what he’s doing, he tells me he’s trying to develop superpowers. I hug him when he says this, and assure him that I have also tried very hard to develop superpowers. I tell him I’m sorry that he doesn’t have them, and to please let me know if he does.

There’s a tv series, Is It Real?, that M is currently into. It presents some realm of pseudoscience and then debunks it. It’s about 60% presentation and 40% debunking, a percentage I wish was tilted the other way, but it’s not a terrible show.

M watched the show and calls out various things to the narrator. He tells the narrator that the photographs were faked, or that Occam’s Razor does not support a theory. I am waiting for him to shout out “confirmation bias!” but he hasn’t got that far in his skepticism yet. Periodically I pause the show to explain how or why some particular thing is not scientifically supported, if I think the show has glossed too quickly. I love my kids’ attachment to rationality, to scientific method, to evidence, to results. We’ve raised them on Mythbusters and I think you can tell. Does it work? Is it real? Is it replicable? How can we tell?

After watching the sea-serpent debunking episode of Is It Real? M pretended to be a sea serpent for a half-hour. He ate dinner with his flippers, and asked if the sweet potatoes would still be tasty underwater. I go along with him when he does this. When M was about two years old, he spent half a year talking is third-person vehicular. “The excavator is thirsty,” he would say. “This dump truck has a scraped tire.” “The excavator doesn’t like tomatoes.” Third-person vehicular. One of the ground rules of the house is that a person must identify their species, build type, derivation, or relevant location in time and space in English, out loud, when asked. And all plasma warp cores, evil scientists, maiasaurs, sea serpents, robots, zombies, or pokemon must obey all household rules of politeness and safety. It’s just common sense.

When I was a kid and teen, I longed for pseudoscience to be real and legitimate. I studied up on Atlantis, psychic powers and military test programs, spontaneous human combustion, hypnotism, astrology, kabbalah, meditation, fakirs, crystals, ley lines, ALL of it. I wanted it to be true. I wanted it to be true because, if it was true, those things could be avenues to power that other people did not have. The pseudosciences could grant me abilities not held by others — quickly, easily, cleanly. No spending years of study and practice learning karate or chemistry! I could read three books on astrology and see the future. I have spent far more hours of my life squinting and concentrating really hard that I care to admit.

I think I understand M’s current fascination with the pseudosciences. If those things work they way they supposedly work, it shortcuts the rules of the physical universe. If energy transfer works the way these people say, then the three laws of thermodynamics can be … bent. Or ignored. Or disobeyed. It would make things so much easier!

But that’s not how the world works. And the way the world does work, once you understand it, is actually pretty damn cool. But it’s time-consuming, and difficult, and it takes energy and effort to comprehend. Not to mention the fact that some of the things reality excludes are just kinda awesome.

Like the Loch Ness monster.

I don’t mind M walking around the house pretending he doesn’t have thumbs because he’s an Aquatic Terror Snake. That’s okay. Because he can also tell me why the Aquatic Terror Snake isn’t real.

Science!

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January 10 2013

I haven’t done one of these in a while! Okay, here’s some random stuff:

1. My Tumblr updates a lot. This is because I have a queue set up to autopost between 5 a.m. and midnight. I also will manually post something from time to time. Right now I have Tumblr set to autotweet each queued post.

This is because … because I use Tumblr to bring things to people’s attention. Or to say hi to a friend. Or to let someone know I saw a thing and thought of them. Or that I think the thing I am re-posting on Tumblr is important and I want a wide audience to see it. More people follow me on Twitter than on Tumblr. Therefore, I tweet each Tumblr post. I want people — specific or in general — to see the thing in question.

However, since these are queued autoposts, I am not always paying attention when the tweet comes through. I may be driving, or at work, or asleep. So if you say something to me about it on Twitter I may not immediately reply because I am not actually there.

2. Circus resumed! K is very happy to be back at her classes. Also, they are all starting to discuss Spring Recital costumes, which always makes me O_o.

3. M is sick, the poor pook. Which means we are all likely going to get it.

In related news, The 2012-2013 flu season is apparently one of the worst in a decade, and there’s a new and more aggressive norovirus strain going around. So, good times.

4. We took the kids to the Minnesota History Center for school yesterday. Not only were the exhibits great, as per usual, but we had the museum almost entirely to ourselves. This meant that the docents and guides spent a certain amount of time enthusiastically talking to my kids about History.

My kids both proved that they really know their stuff. All kinds of stuff relating to Minnesota and U.S. history. I was really very pleased. We don’t quiz the kids, particularly. And at this point they both get a lot of their general knowledge from reading library books without close supervision. So it’s not immediately evident how much they are learning.

But, clearly, they are learning.

Both the kids are at the very edge of that point in the accumulation of facts, whereafter the accumulation of more facts is easier because you already have a mental system designed for the storage and use of facts. This is a good place to be.

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Winter Solstice, Camelot Station

I seem to blog about John M. Ford’s poem, Winter Solstice, Camelot Station, every year.

2009.

2010.

2011.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the process of growing up. I think about this because I have kids, and I want them to enter the world as adults fully prepared to face life. Or as prepared as I can make them. As prepared as the thing I can control can be controlled.

I look at various adult people I know, friends and family and coworkers and internet acquaintances, and I think, “yes, I want my kid to have THAT trait. How did you get that?” Or I think, ” … that seems a less-than-perfectly-optimal strategy you have, there. How can I give my kid a tool that will perform that skill better?”

And I look at myself, at how I have always thought I was a perfectly competent human being, from the age of twelve on up. And every five years or so I look back at the me of five years past and I shake my head, wanting to weep with how naive and ignorant I was then. And this, this process? It doesn’t end. Or, it hasn’t ended yet.

This growing up business, it doesn’t seem to ever end.

Arthur, Lance, Gwen — god, they were changing the world. They changed the world. They changed their world. They were young and certain and passionate and held glory in both hands. Purpose and promise spilled forth from them and covered all of mythic England.

And then they got older. Mistakes were made. And those mistakes lingered, became part of identity. Did they grow wiser as they grew older? Sometimes. In some versions of the story, they did. They do. They will. Mostly, not. Mostly they don’t get that chance.

In Ford’s poem, we have a moment in which the chances are still there. The future hangs in the steel-and-glass rafters of Camelot Station, it drifts in the steam and smoke, the future sounds in the clank of lever and gear and wheel. In Ford’s poem we have the darkest day, in a moment of shadow and uncertainty for these glorious people. They have built, they have wrought, and they don’t know what to do next. They can’t see the path ahead. There are no tracks there, yet.

Tradition would dictate that what happens next is fall, and ruin, and betrayal that leaves a bitter taste in one’s mouth until death clears it away. Tradition says, all this crumbles and is lost.

But in the poem it hasn’t happened yet. And the magic of solstice is, this is as dark as things will ever get. The truth of solstice is that there can and will be more light tomorrow. Situations will improve. As cold and dark and trackless as this moment is, it will not get worse.

I like to think that this is true in the poem. I like to think that this time, in this steampunk rail-fantasy Arthurian AU, THIS time these flashing, blazing, brilliant people figure out a way through darkness. I like to think that this is as dark as it gets. That they meet, and they talk, and they learn and grow. I like to think that these knights become greater than the sum of their parts. That they find strength in their broken places.

The sun is winter-low. Kay’s caravan is rolling.
He may not run a railroad, but he runs a tight ship;
By the time they unload in the Camelot courtyard,
The wassail will be hot and the goose will be crackling,
Banners snapping from their towers, fir logs on the fire, drawbridge down,
And all that sackbut and psaltery stuff.
Blanchefleur is taking the children caroling tonight,
Percivale will lose to Merlin at chess,
The young knights will dally and the damsels dally back,
The old knights will play poker at a smaller Table Round.
And at the great glass station, motion goes on,
The extras, the milk trains, the varnish, the limiteds,
The Pindar of Wakefield, the Lady of the Lake,
The Broceliande Local, the Fast Flying Briton,
The nerves of the kingdom, the lines of exchange,
Running to a schedule as the world ought,
Ticking like a hot-fired hand-stoked heart,
The metal expression of the breaking of boundaries,
The boilers that turn raw fire into power,
The driving rods that put the power to use,
The turning wheels that make all places equal,
The knowledge that the train may stop but the line goes on;
The train may stop
But the line goes on.

The train may stop.

But the line goes on.

Happy Solstice, everyone. Tomorrow will be brighter.

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December 17 2012

My mind keeps flinching away from the school shooting in Connecticut. And then I return to poke at the news, and I see more images, or someone says something that captures a small portion of the awfulness. And then I tear up for a moment, and sniff, and blink really fast, and then go back to work.

I finished my Yuletide fic.
I’m re-watching some of the Fringe first season.
I’m working out some car-wrangling with J, since her windshield is broken.
I’m adding things to the week’s grocery list.
I’m emailing people about projects and work.
I’m searching the fic tags on AO3 for things I like.
I’m reblogging things on Tumblr.
I’m hugging my kids when I’m home. A lot.

I’m very glad that I always make sure to tell the kids that I love them, whenever I leave the house or they do. Whenever we’re going to be apart.

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Inadvertent lessons

My kids read a lot. A lot. And a huge part of what they read are books I’ve never read. Fiction and non-fiction, all sorts of things. I wonder, reasonably frequently, what they are getting from these books.

I wonder this because I know the sorts of thing I gleaned from the fiction I consumed as a kid. Messages I am certain someone would have corrected, had I told anyone what I was learning. This came to mind when I was putting together the recent post about Disney movies on my youth. Specifically regarding the film Dragonslayer.

Now, Dragonslayer was not a very good film. But I watched it and rewatched it on basic cable, fascinated with certain aspects of the film. I couldn’t care less about the idiot boy pretending to be a wizard — whatevs. But the movie had not merely ONE girl character, it had TWO. And what happened to them is … educational.

Elspeth is the perfect girly girl, a princess, who is protected by the men in her life through a web of lies. When she finds out the truth, she takes a stand, and dies for it. Valerian lies about being a girl, pretends to be a boy and young man all of her life, she lies to protect herself. When she tells the truth and reveals that she’s a girl, the men who control her life attempt to have her killed.

That’s not an exaggeration; that’s the plot of the film. Simply being female is a lottery of death.

I can’t remember exactly how old I was when I saw Dragonslayer. Twelve, maybe? But the message I clearly got was, when they find out you are a girl, they will hurt you. I didn’t have any real inkling as to who the They was. In Dragonslayer it was everyone. The entire community in conspiracy.

I’m pretty sure if I’d mentioned this worldview to any responsible adult, they would have corrected my misapprehension.

…

Or, maybe not. Sometimes, the world does not look particularly safe for women. I don’t know what anyone would have said to me, had I mentioned my conclusions drawn from this reasonably terrible Disney film.

Still, I don’t know what my kids are getting from the books they read, the videos they watch. I know what I think the messages are. But I’m not a nine-year-old, trying to make sense of things which manifestly don’t always make any kind of sense. (Try to explain “banned books” to a kid sometime. They give you the BEST “grown-ups are crazy” look.)

So I ask my kids about what they read and watch. I check in, and try to be available for questions. And I pre-emptively talk about the world and how it works. I know things are going to slip through, misconceptions over which I have no control. I hope to catch most of the big ones, though.

:fingers crossed:

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First snowfall of the year

1. It finally snowed! The children are quite pleased with this turn of events. I am less pleased, because I have need to drive in the snow, and all I can think is “reduced coefficient of friction, reduced coefficient of friction,” over and over and over again.

2. We have a backyard trampoline, as I may have mentioned. When one lives in snowy climes, one has two choices vis-a-vis the trampoline. One can take it down and store it during the winter, or one can keep it free of snow. (The weight of the snow, you understand, will stretch the springs, making the trampoline not-bouncy.)

We decided to leave the trampoline up this winter. This means that, each snowfall, someone must go out and clear it of snow. We decided that this is an ideal job for a pair of nine-year-olds.

They seem to love said task. We’ll see if they still love it in March …

3. J got the kids some cheap slides this past week. They are sheets of, I don’t know, vinyl? called “slicks”. One rolls them up, carries them to an appropriate hill, and unrolls them for use as a sled. It is my understanding that the homeschool neighborhood playgroup is meeting for sledding this afternoon. It is my understanding that the slicks are supposed to go quite fast. Good luck to everyone, is what I say.

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Park Square Theater

1. I love pretty much every thing I see at Park Square Theater. The size of the venue is great and the kids and I can always see the stage. The production values are high. The casts are almost always racially and ethnically diverse. And the shows are just good. Well done, well performed, well produced. I just like ‘em.

2. We took the kids to see a school matinee of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As Shakespeare goes, this is a pretty good one for a brace of nine-year-olds. It’s funny. It’s about poor decision making on a level that makes sense to kids. And even if my kids aren’t in the realm of love and sex dramas yet, personally, they understand when people are behaving like idiots.

The theater was packed. Absolutely full, mostly of high school students. Who were loud and restless and talkative during all the waiting around, and were reasonably quiet and attentive during the actual show. I was pleased to see the show was nearly sold out — both for the continued health of Park Square’s student matinees, and for the future of cultural literacy in the world.

3. I always forget just how many quotable lines of Shakespeare come from this play. Sheesh.

4. I’ve seen MND at the Guthrie, and I’ve seen the movie, and I’ve seen snippets on YouTube. But I had never seen a production until this one that made the second act fight between the four young lovers abso-fucking-lutely hilarious. I was wheezing, I was laughing so hard. K fell off her chair. And the Pyramus and Thisby at the end? Riotously funny.

5. In a bit of casting which I am not-at-all-clear on the traditionality of, the actors doubled and tripled up on their roles. The Duke and Hippolyta were Oberon and Titania. The young lovers were also players, and also faeries. Only the actor playing Bottom had a single role. It worked very well, especially in the final scenes.

6. Dave Gangler played Puck. He did a very, very nice job with a role that is oft-borrowed in other stories. (Dead Poets Society, I’m looking at YOU.) He was athletic, and reasonably acrobatic, and capered very believably. He also did a bit of under-pitching some of Puck’s most famous lines, blending them into the rest of the speeches. I approve.

7. The young lovers were Hope Cervantes as Hermia, Ricardo Vazquez as Lysander, Adia Morris as Helena, and Eric Sharp as Demetrius. (We had seen Sharp recently, in the Mu Performing Arts’ Into the Woods. My daughter told me he played Rapunzel’s Prince.)

Cervantes was engaging and compelling right from the start. By the time we got to her big fight with Helena after the intermission, she was hilarious. I found Morris’s Helena kinda meh in the first act, but also incredibly funny in the second. I think that has more to do with Helena than with Morris’s skills — I find Helena kinda hard to take. Vazquez and Sharp were perfectly fine in the first act, and came to life in the second. Again, I think this has a lot more to do with the characters-as-written than with any deficiencies in acting. When given a chance to more more than harp on the single note each character starts out with, all the actors were good.

8. Terry Hempleman played Bottom. Now, I traditionally find the slapstick parts of Shakespeare to be the parts least interesting to me. Not so, here! Bottom and the the players were lively, engaging, and very funny. Much, I imagine, as they were intended to be all along. Hempleman did something I’d never seen before – Bottom was funny but still retained his essential dignity. Very well done, Mr. Hempleman.

9. The kids loved it. Not just my kids, either. The students in the theater were engaged. When Helena and Hermia began to fight? I distinctly heard someone a few seats over suck in her breath through her teeth in a way I cannot imitate, but which clearly means, “shit is going DOWN, my friends”. And the bit at the end, with the Wall? The actors had to wait for the laughter die back.

10. This is a good show. If you’re local, I recommend it. I also recommend you take a look at the rest of PSTs season. There’s a lot of fun stuff coming up. I intend to go to more of it.

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