I woke up thinking about hairless cats. From a distance you think, “oh look, a cat. I love cats”, but as you get closer something definitely feels weird. Their ears seem a bit long. They look frightfully skinny. In fact, as you get right up next to them, you realize they look an awful lot like Madonna.
I forced myself to touch the hairless cat. The cat needed no such emotional preparation. I had a new best friend. I couldn't sit down without its freakish face rubbing maniacally against my chest. I tried to breath deep and look at it as a living creature that needs love just as much as any critter graced with fur might, but in the end I had to call it a mean name and push it to the ground. Gross. I'm sorry. I had to get out of there.
We took the van to get a new tire. Emily and I did lunges in the waiting room. Twenty five on each leg was all it took to totally wind us. This insane altitude, man! It got us drunk fast the night before and prematurely ended the amusement and pleasure of the mechanics who took turns peeking at us from around the corner. If not for the thin air we may have never gotten our tire changed. Panting, we rubbed our thighs and wobbled back to the van, inviting the mechanics to the show if they want to see more.
And so at 8PM, Mountain Time, the El Circo Cheapo tradition of acrobat wrangling began. Acrobats moving chairs, acrobats putting on false eyelashes, acrobats chugging sugar-free Red Bulls, acrobats groaning in pain. All I really want the acrobats to do it stand on and jump over each other for 10 min. Is that so hard? Oh, right. Yes, it is. But eventually we warm up, open doors and the show begins.
The thin air and the dancing in the opening number make my singing sound like the hairless cat. I'm panting and wheezing. Pathetic. The audience for our first show is packed with old people...they don't get the joke and they are pissed that we started 30 minutes late.
We have a lot of work to do.
I can't run the sound. I keep hitting the wrong song, it turns off ½ way through the act if I look at my computer wrong. The 16 foot ceilings are more terrifying for us than the 30 ft we are used to. Will we hit our heads on the ceiling? Will we hit them on the floor? Stupid future, being all full of mystery and shit.
The very second that Cameron opens her mouth, though, they are in love with us. They want to kiss us and marry us. We hit the ceiling and we hit the floor but we defy minor injury for the most part (at 16 feel you're not defying death, your defying bruises). We hit our acro act, we sell 4 shirts at intermission and at the end of the show...we get a standing ovation.
Gravity is for chumps, and sometimes we're chumptastic, but no one really seems to care.
Emily and I venture out to find dinner...a tall task at 11:30 on a Tuesday night in South Denver. An hour later we come back to find ravenous acrobats about to eat blocks of chalk and wash it down with spray rosin. Instead we give them pizza, pasta, steak salad, garlic bread, chocolate cake and Jack Daniels. We stuff our faces, watch “The House Bunny” and fall asleep under the delicate glow of the florescent light that we can't figure out how to turn off. I am profoundly happy.
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