Clown

While I was at the Stillness in Action program recently I made a drawing, as you do in these processes, that was a projection into my future life. I included words like ‘sing’ and ‘play’ and ‘theatre’ and drew an absurd red jester’s tri-cornered hat across the whole page – over everything.  Since I returned a local group has asked for my assistance to set up an incorporated association, Pilot Light Productions,  for theatre work involving youth and community; to write their grant applications and perform in their Music Hall -( singing and being as comic as I like!) The Woodgate Singers performed last week in a fund raiser for Uniting Churches and I was asked to join a fellow singer as the clown to her straight act and in my dressing gown, a beanie and slippers, carrying a  very large coffee cup that would hold an aspidistra, I brought the house down. (How I loved the moments of bathing in audience laughter). Then today at the Childers Festival in front of 600 people I took up the invitation of the Elvis impersonator to imitate Elvis moves and win a Brass Monkeys T Shirt  (not a single other soul would do so  – and the song was almost at an end and I didn’t want him to lose the audience connection!)  So I shimmied forward, took up the performance space at the bottom of the stage and  did every Elvis move I recalled that my body could approximate (stiff legs, numb  chest and feet and all). He came down from the stage and told the audience he would put this female Elvis to the test. I then had to imitate every move he made and he kept handing the mike over for the last word in ‘…love you too much baby’ and the backing ‘doo das’ in between. Got every move as best I could (hooray for a movement history), stuffed up a few ‘doo das’ but always got the ‘baby’ and the audience got the fun that he had hoped for (they gave me great feedback after). He decided I could dance and sing and had earned the T Shirt! So I got a Brass Monkeys men’s XL which I will send  to my brother to wear in Sydney where it will probably read like a weather report! So friends be careful what you wish for!