mushin no shin

Just got back from the “Bindlestiff Family Cirkus and Magic Hat Summer Variety Show Tour” — allright, where do I begin…

OK — start with a circus, slice the budget to nil, lose the animals, fit it into a tiny art-theater space, and let the whole thing be performed by six people. Then make it all work with a healthy dose of retro-vaudeville schtick, and glue it together with plenty of humor, most of it just barely this side of bawdy. What do you get? I have no fucking idea, but I just saw it.

I suppose you might call it the circus equivalent of a garage band.

There was the sexy, tatooed, precision-bullwhipping ring-mistress. There was the flaming gay man in a blue bunny suit, whose function seemed to be “to be the flaming gay man in the blue bunny suit”. Throw in a spritely acrobat-slash-hula-hoop girl, and a guy who does the tightrope bit. And arguably the “star” is a fellow who handled duties as clown, twister-of-phallic-ballons, weilder-of-yoyo-like-gadgets, spinner of a variety of tops, and finally, sword swallower (who supplies his own jokes about sword swallowing). Oh, and *everybody* juggles, without apologies for varying degrees of success.

Then there was my favorite, “Skip”, the maestro who provided the musical accompaniment — handling keyboards, guitar, vocalized sound effects, and harmonica-through-a-bullhorn. And this was all before getting to his solo feature, in which he introduced us to the heretofore untapped tonality of the Tampax tampon. I’ll just have to leave that to your imagination.

All in all a damn good time for anyone far enough askew to appreciate it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 20th, 2006 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Babble, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.