Jacob Performs a Miracle, and then Graduates from College.

The Circus bus passed inspection! Jacob pulled off a small miracle by obtaining a fire extinguisher, chock blocks and orange safety triangles and then somehow getting to the inspection place minutes before it closed. The inspection guys apparently were very surprised, they told him they honestly hadn’t thought we were going to be able to pull off passing the inspection with the bus.

The last week has been pretty bus-intense for our troupe (especially Jacob and I.) We’ve taken a trip to a junkyard located in the middle of miles of nearly uninhabited woods (creepy…) we’ve been to the Trucking Repair place (the only place around that would look at the bus) 3 or 4 times at this point, we’ve been to the Auto Glass place three times - and every time we went somewhere new with the bus, we somehow managed to get not-quite-right directions and would end up towns away from where we wanted to be.

But now our bus passed inspection!! Never mind the leaking oil, the rotted exhaust pipe and the falling-apart coolant hose! Those things we can deal with in Boston.

Huge props to Jacob who never gave up (except a whole lot of his time and energy) and ultimately saved our bus! Huge props to Jacob who did all of this right up until today - the day he graduates from Hampshire College! Happy graduation Jacob. Your dedication in all that you do is both impressive and inspiring. And happy graduation to Rachel as well! You guys are both amazing.

Laughter and Young Ladies.

Proper young ladies do not laugh too loud… a little insight into how I may have escaped adolescence with my loud laugher intact.

Introducing… Rachel!

Pretty soon, my housemate Rachel will be posting to the blog as well! She’s a linguistics major at Hampshire College who wrote some awesome science fiction employing some kick ass metaphor.

She is the author of a column “I Could Never Get the Hang of Thursdays” in which she impersonated/channeled/séanced Douglass Adams and wrote about things he would write about. I published it in The Omen.

I’m really excited for her to post, because she’s brilliant and funny!

The Funny Thing About PVC Pipes and Salad Dressing…

Today I attempted pirouettes while on parallettes (basically doing spinning handstands by shifting from a one raised pipe to another.) I was only partially successful - but I hope with practice to be able to do it well, maybe even in time for the tour!

Parallettes are very useful tools for hand balancing, stretching over splits and regular splits, push ups, planches and all sorts of fun things, and they are quite easy to make. All you need is a fair amount of PVC piping and some connectors, which is why Jacob and I decided to make our own pairs earlier this year.

There was a relatively amusing story that went along with the making of our parallettes: While we were out buying the supplies for the parallettes, we stopped at a grocery store to buy salad dressing for a delicious chicken marinade. Excited to turn our PVC piping into gymnastics equipment we went straight to Lemelson (Hampshire’s shop) to cut the PVC to the right length. We checked in with Don and Ben, who were helping to oversee the shop and they looked at the PVC and they looked at the salad dressing and they looked at us and as we started to explain they waved us into the shop shaking their heads and protesting that they didn’t want to know.

Gymnastics Reflections

Today is the last day of gymnastics for an unforeseen amount of time. I plan to keep working out and I am going on this circus tour. However, I think it’s also important to reflect on what I have learned in the two years of gymnastics and circus training.

I started circus work in earnest when I got a summer camp counselor job at Circus Smirkus from June—August 2006. It was one of those experiences in which I could list new things I learned just about every single day. I managed to keep a log of it for the first several weeks.

Following that, I took up gymnastics at a local gym. It, like most other gyms, is oriented toward the girls competitive team and the youth classes. There was an adult class once a week started by these two guys, Matt and Gabe, who are awesome. I was there from September 2006—August 2007, and then from January till now. When I started I could sort of do a cartwheel, and I was beginning to understand what a handstand was about. Now, even though we’ve only taken the class once a week, I have a much more solid grounding.

When I started, my goals were to have a press handstand that I could hold in place, and a solid tumbling pass or a back tuck. Now, I…

• can hold a handstand for nearly thirty seconds
• can press into a handstand (woo!)
• can do a decent cartwheel and a passable roundoff
• am very close to doing an unaided back handspring on the floor, and can do it on the tumble track
• can usually do a front handspring
• have successfully done a front tuck
• have a solid back extension roll
• can do other things that aren’t coming to mind right now

I’m really proud of my progress. Certainly I have a lot of things to work on, like getting the front handspring all the time, and getting over my fear of a roundoff back handspring. Basically I need more time, more repetitions. I don’t have a back tuck or a solid tumbling pass yet, which means I have a lot more work to do. Practicing once a week isn’t enough, clearly, and neither is starting at age twenty. My body isn’t as willing to stretch as it was even five years before. But I’ve made considerable gains in the past two years, and I intend to keep going!

What are some things you’ve progressed on, and what are your goals?

QotD

My mom sent this to me, and it sums up how I have felt about television recently:

“Yes it is still another TV program I have never seen. As the list grows it provides me more and more clues about why I am so smart and cheerful.”
– Roger Ebert on Dukes of Hazard

Circus Performance in Boston - And Other Ways to Keep Up With Our Circus.

For those of you who use facebook with any regularity and have any interest in seeing us perform in Boston, MA - please check out our event. If you want to catch our performances around the rest of the country, want regular updates or to keep tabs on our progress - definitely check out our facebook group, Criss Cross Circus. Or, again, feel free to check out our website and subsequent blog. I know the information on our website and blog is sparse at best, but honest as soon as classes are over I’ll go crazy updating the thing!

For those Boston people who may not be frequenters of facebook - I will tell you the information for the one show we definitely have booked:

Start Time:	Thursday, May 22, 2008 at 10:00pm
End Time:	Friday, May 23, 2008 at 1:00am
Location:	Lilly Pad
Street:	1353 Cambridge Street
City/Town:	Cambridge, MA

“We are in Dark Times…
The apocalypse has happened.
The world as we know it has ended.
A talented troupe of Eco-Punk kids bring you a spectacular show while they roam the country looking for survivors. Tragic and uplifting, we bring you a cautionary tale of environmental disaster and show you just how the resilient the human spirit can be!”

Please come and bring your friends!

(See, our show is very science-fiction related what with the Apocalypse and all.)

The brilliance that is Ayreon

In the category of things that I have been almost constantly excited about since learning about them two years ago (I suppose that’s a rather specific category) is the musical project known as Ayreon. Ayreon is the brainchild of Arjen Anthony Lucassen and has a very satisfactory wikipedia entry, so I now cease telling you things that you could be reading over there. Instead I will tell you why I love Ayreon.

If you’ve ever been listening to some heavy metal and thought, “Damn, this could really use a classical string quartet breakdown right about now,” or, alternatively, been at an orchestra recital and thought, “Wow, some guy should totally be out front wailing on a guitar over this epic track,” then you may find Ayreon extremely satisfying. Now, maybe you listen to symphonic metal groups like Nightwish and you think you’ve got it covered in the strings and shredding category, but I encourage you to check out Ayreon because it will bring you something new. I can’t guarantee that you will enjoy it, but it will be different.

Arjen is steeped in rock history and he loves every bit of it. The albums are influenced by almost every conceivable genre. A few of these being heavy metal, progressive metal, progressive rock, psychedelic rock, blues rock, folk, celtic traditional and other world musics. The songs tend to be long, sweeping, and split into several different movements with lots of variety. I think this contributes to the albums immense replay value. There are no segments that really go on too long: as soon as I am getting familiar with that monster guitar riff, there’ll be a key change and a violin swell, or a mandolin solo. It’s utter, delicious, music-geeky madness.

I highly recommend it.

Circus Cities

We’ve got a tentative itinerary for the circus tour!

• May 18—22: Boston, MA
• May 24—28: Chicago, IL
• May 29—June 2: St. Louis, MO
• June 4—6: Boulder, CO
• June 8—12: San Francisco
• June 13—18: Seattle

Click here for a nice calendar display, which sadly has no shows on it yet. We do have some shows booked, so I’ll post them soon. There could be changes to this schedule—we have invitations attached to money if we go further north.

In the meantime, entertain yourself with this photo of Tara sweeping the bus, and a free preview of the interior!

P.S.

What would you put in your Apocalypse Preparedness Kit?