Me Me Me Me Me Me

I'm now wired into every one of the most popular (read: common) online social-networking/self-promotion/nonsense-posting-place thingamabob that a person can sign up for.

1) Blogger - This is now starting to be an obsession for me. I'm really wracking my brain for interesting things to note and write about life. A friend of mine (Laura Scott Wade) wrote me (on Facebook) telling me how great it was to see me blogging. That she tried to do it everyday, with varying degrees of success. That got me to try this everyday thing myself. We'll see how long it lasts, I'm really gonna try for it. Once the baby comes, it could go either way. Either I'll be posting more, or not at all.

2) Facebook - I can't live without this thing. All my friends in one place. When I'm mass notifying people, this is my go-to, and I have to keep a separate list of non-Facebook people so they're not left out of the loop. I've read some things about the evils of Facebook. Anything that is THAT powerful, that you're THAT dependent upon, that people who don't use it are almost ostracized, should not be in existence. That it's own popularity is its downfall. Seems counterintuitive to me, and like I said, all my friends in one place. It's better than email!

3) Twitter - I'm still getting the hang of this thing. I'm not really "getting" it. Maybe I'm not the right guy for it. I'm following very clever people with poignant things to say in 140 characters or less. And I'm really just using it as a status update like Facebook. In fact, I have it so that every tweet updates my Facebook status. It's fun looking at others' tweets, but I'm not really feeling myself contributing effectively and creatively.

4) My Website - This is a place for self love. Nothing else. Nobody goes here. Why would they?! There's just something about this that makes me feel like I've accomplished something in my life. I can't just have regular-old inner self-satisfaction. No, I gotta put it all down in a website and have it be searchable on Google. I'm not promoting anything, I'm not looking for work, I'm not selling a product. I just thought I should have a website. I think it's pretty.

5) YouTube - A sudden burst of inspiration a few months ago with the lipsyncing series, and all of a sudden, YouTube has gotten back on my radar. The weirdest thing about YouTube and the syncing thing is that some of them got onto a German blog site and became something of a mini phenomenon. I got thousands of hits literally overnight. I felt like the David Hasselhoff of lipsyncing for two days.

6) Flickr - I just restarted this after downloading the new app for the iPhone (more on that below). I'm still not sure when to put pictures here and when to put them on Facebook. Do I post them in both places?

7) I've tried other, not-so-common places like SoulPancake, the Cirque Tribune, ukulele forums, etc. Maybe I should give these places a better college try. I think these off-the-beaten-path places are more focused and niched and could actually shape myself as a person and as a performer more effectively. I can still swim in the public pools, but the water in these other places may have less urine in it.

I'm plugged into all these places, admittedly, only because I think I should be. It hasn't really sunk in as wholly satisfying or an important part of my existence. And the iPhone makes the immediacy of all these elements that much more strong. The iPhone may be the one thing that wrangles all six of these online places together, more so even than my laptop.

And as I've stated before in this blog, maybe I'm just doing this for my son-to-be. Maybe he can look to these postings, status updates, videos, pictures, and tweets and piece together some sort of inner wisdom (or purposeful lack thereof) that he can't get from me one-on-one. Or maybe he can eventually pick up where I leave off and contribute to some vast, electronic Slonina stream of consciousness. Or not.

The Brostrom Procedure

Doctor's orders.

Looks like I'll be getting myself into surgery sometime next year. After several sprains on my right foot, my MRI has shown a complete break in my ankle's ligament. Luckily for me, the Brostrom procedure that they'll perform on me is a pretty standard one with a high rate of success. And since I'm not in immediate pain and can function in the show with a torn ligament, there's no rush for surgery. Bad news is, recovery time is 12 weeks.

When to do it? I think it's important to do it after the baby is born, but before he's walking. And the show is going overseas in 2011. If I stay with it, I'll want this procedure done in the States, for sure. So, we're looking at June 2010, when the show is in Seattle, Vancouver, and partially Houston.

The baby will be six months old, and we're pretty confident that the wife can take care of two babies in the house by then! With Worker's Comp footing the bill and partial lost wages payment, taking 3 months off, yet staying on tour, AND spending full time with Junior sounds like win-win all around.

Now I gotta get around my fears of the competency of the health care system. Don't get me started.

More Laughter Hating

This was brought to my attention by my buddy, Jonathan Taylor.

www.ihateclowns.com

You know, it's not so much this guy who runs this site: Rodney Blackwell (email him if you'd like at rodney@ihateclowns.net). He's obviously got some chronic, latent, sexual attraction to clowns that he feels he needs to mask at all cost. But it's the people that subscribe to and have fun fueling this saddening trend.

Clowns seem to be getting the bad rap mimes have been enduring for the past few decades, another dying art form thanks to dimwitted knee-jerk reactions. But at least clowns have been portrayed as terrifying monsters in movies and such, even this Blackwell idiot attributes his hatred for clowns to the killer clown scene in The Wiz. (Really?) And sure, John Wayne Gacy doesn't help the situation any. But where does the mime stigma come from?

I brought all this up on SoulPancake.com a while back, hoping for a mature, maybe even spiritual, point of view. This from one commenter:

"Comedians are not the same as clowns. Silent film stars were mimes, of a sort. But when clowns in clown make-up are floating around anything outside a circus ring - even outside on the periphery, working the circus crowd, they are just plain creepy. Hospital Clowns = creepy. Birthday Party Clowns = creepy. As in serial killer-creepy. Masks are fine. Clown make-up is creepy. It's ruined, I tell you. So no, there is no way to redeem it. I defy you to try. I dare you. You know what people will say? 'Creepy.'"

So there it is. Creepy as a fact. It's not this person's opinion, it's a fact of life. Someone told me just yesterday that all TV was a waste of time. Again, just something to say to sound interesting. Full House is maybe a waste of time, but Mad Men itself is worth the price of cable. In the same vein, the clown from Stephen King's "It": creepy; Avner the Eccentric: genius.

Maybe just think twice before you give your opinion on clowns and mimes. If nothing else, my future may depend on it.

Fat Ale

New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins, CO invited the Cirque folk to their headquarters for a tour and some R & R.

This is a company with the right idea all around. A business that cares about its employees as much as its product, hosting beach volleyball every Thursday in the backyard of their brewery, among other oddball perks. Environmentally conscious, artist-friendly (they host the bacchanalian Tour de Fat every year), and their beer don't suck. It's the sort of thing that might turn this imported beer snob onto a domestic ale with good karma.

Why Stop the Laughter?!

I recently found out from a Canadian colleague that there is controversy in Quebec about clowns entertaining the elderly in nursing homes. The government has alotted some money to provide these specially trained clowns at senior's residences. And the opinion columns in the Quebec newspapers actually raised a stink!

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Quit clowning around with the elderly
The Gazette
Published: Saturday, May 23, 2009

Marguerite Blais has some big shoes to fill - literally. The minister in charge of seniors affairs has apparently got it into her head that what the residents of the province's old folks' homes need to bring a little sunshine into their lives is a squad of clowns. Blais told La Presse this week, in the middle of that newspaper's devastating series on the drab conditions in many senior's residences, that she'll announce officially on Monday that her department has signed an agreement with "Dr. Clown." Hmm - given how many people can't find a general practitioner these days, we wonder if she had to wait long for an appointment.

The program is to cost $293,000 over four years, and that's no joke. Surely it would be cheaper and the antics just as clownish to provide every old-age residence, public and private, with a free live feed of the National Assembly's daily question period. Now in fairness, these are specially trained "therapeutic clowns," not the common or garden variety red-nosed, flower-squirting, floppy shoed sadists you see terrifying kids at some birthday parties. But we're not sure what they can contribute, if anything, to aging gracefully or happily.

There's nothing wrong with providing a little stimulation for the elderly. Indeed, it's sorely needed. With no job to go to any more, no family or home to care for, no rose bush to prune and no lawn to mow, the old can find that time often hangs heavy on their hands. One of La Presse's most depressing stories focused on the air of boredom and torpor in many old-age residences.

But clowns, for heavens' sake. The whole notion smacks of condescension. These aren't wrinkled 4 year-olds we're talking about, but mature adults rich in experience and knowledge. They deserve better than clowns. Lectures, perhaps, movies, string quartets, stand-up comics, even. Or maybe if the government really wants to help, it should find ways to reconnect the elderly to their communities and to their families. Unvisited and alone, their ennui often springs as much from alienation as it does from fading faculties.

Last week we found out the government had invested in a luxury hotel for dogs and cats, and now we find it's sending in the clowns. Tired governments usually run out of ideas; Jean Charest's Liberals seem to come up with bad ones instead. If it's not too late, Minister Blais should cancel her appointment with Dr. Clown.

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As a clown with an elderly mother who lives in a nursing home, AND who's deaf, so she can't hear 'lectures, movies, string quartets, or stand-up comics', I take particular umbrage with this shithead. He obviously knows nothing about clowns or the elderly. It brings to mind another question I've wrestled with recently: Will the art of clowning or mime ever become respectable again?

To this, I turn to an astute Facebook entry from an exceptional actor and clown, Molly Brennan.

"There is something unsettling about garish makeup, on a clown, a senior citizen, or the young women who stagger around my neighborhood on weekends. And I can't help but feel for people who have real phobias of anything. But, because I clown, I am often engaged in the "clowns are scary" conversation, and I think there is a certain amount of just saying "I'm scared of clowns" because it's perceived as a funny or interesting thing to say. Like hating mimes. Mime is an incredible practice, and people who are good at it are really mind blowing. But somehow it has become cool to say "I hate mimes." Or hating lawyers. I know some awesome people who are lawyers. I've even met some pretty incredible cops in my time. It's part of the same conversation we started a few weeks ago, Noah. "Are Mountain Dew and Cheetos really delicious? I don't THINK so, but we've believed it for so long, it's hard to tell what I really think." People say things sometimes without thinking, and the more they say it, the truer it becomes. So, if you honestly asked a scary clowns person: "Really. Really. Are you REALLY afraid of clowns? Are you afraid of Buster Keaton? Are you afraid of Lucille Ball? Are you afraid of Paul Kalina?" That person might respond with "What the fuck are you talking about?" To which, a great response is: "What the fuck are YOU talking about?" And, with any luck, there is a reexamination of the rote statement that the person has been making, and PERHAPS, change happens..."

Not My Job

I accidentally kicked over a patron's drink in the audience today. I apologized. She looked at me and fumed, "You're gonna pay for that, right?" I looked at her with disdain and said, "Yeah right!" and started to walk away. She said, "Excuse me?!" and started to shout, "Don't ignore me. Do not ignore me!" I ignored the crap out of her. She went and complained to the head usher and got her free refill. And she proceeded to watch the rest of the show in her first row center seat with air of huffiness around her. Never clapped, didn't join in with the standing ovation at the end of the show.

One of my favorite things to blurt out to people in preshow when I'm getting in people's way is, "It's that kind of show!" It IS that kind of show! If you're in the front row of a Cirque show, you're gonna get messed with and spills happen. If you're gonna get angry over an overpriced drink, you shouldn't have bought your tickets in the first place.

Today I'm grateful that I can be obnoxious and surly in my profession and get away with it. In fact, it's encouraged! And I'm grateful when I can effectively piss people off who deserve it.

Contact Your Elected Officials to REALLY Get Stuff Done

A few days ago, Facebook was littered with people updating their status thusly: "No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick." This would usually be followed by instructions to cut and paste this to the reader's status for anywhere from a whole day to a whole week. It got me frustrated that people were thinking that updating a Facebook status could make a difference.

But perhaps it has. I have decided to not only plug the Congress.org site, but also to provide a dummy-proof step-by-step, just to illustrate how damn easy it is to actually make a difference.

1. Go to www.congress.org and enter your home ZIP code.

2. Choose your Senator. (Once you've completed this process, go back and choose the other one, and repeat the process).

3. Click on the Contact tab.

4. Click "Web Form".

5. Select your message. This will be the email's subject line. There's an option at the bottom to compose your own letter. Again, you can start the process over again later and choose another message. Then click Next Step at the bottom.

6. Add your own message. This is where you need to write the body of the letter, but GOOD NEWS, shorter is better! Even one or two sentences. Tell 'em what you really feel. They'll get the point. Put your name in the appropriate box...

7. Same page further down: The obligatory Prefix, Name, Email, Address, etc. Keep the "Remember Me!" box checked, cuz you can come back here with all your grievances and make this process even fricking EASIER! Click Send Message at the bottom. And you're done!

You'll get a confirmation email and the satisfaction that you've behaved like an actual citizen of this country.

Thanks for your time!