Pocket Theatre Adventures with Minion Productions

Our summer adventures are just about to begin and we’re well underway in preparation. One show down, two shows left to go and then we are on our way to Montreal! Last weekend we hit up the Pocket Theatre in Seattle as a part of the Minion Traveling Showcase event. The space was fun and the show went well, but it’s the lead up that’s the interesting part.

Once upon a time last weekend in a land not so very far away there lived three clowns who have some of the the most interesting adventures...

2:00pm Laura returns home and we are tasked with installing a new roof-rack, loading and hitting the road to Seattle in a new, improved clown car-now even smaller than before! We’ve installed roof-racks before- it shouldn’t take us more than a half our with all three of us working- right?

2:15pm The struggle becomes real

2:30pm Punches, kicks and hair pulls happen, then we realize we’re fighting each other and not the stupid roof-rack

2:45pm A slight ray of hope

3:00pm All hope destroyed by the mighty willpower of the roof-rack

3:15pm Laura watches the installation video on youtube and swoops in to save the day!

3:30pm Do a little dance and pack the rest of the stuff in the car

3:45pm We finally get on the road.

Although we hit the road later than anticipated, we are clowns and are able to roll with the punches. We arrived at the theatre in good humor around 7:00pm with just enough time to grab a cup of coffee and get into costume before loading in at 8:00pm and starting the show at 8:30pm.

But wait… There is more… After grabbing said cup of coffee from a lovely shop across the street, we headed back to the car to grab a couple things- whereupon we were set upon by a delirious man with a stitched up fat bottom lip like someone gave him a wallop and with eyes so glazed over, even a donut would have been jealous. First he tried to snatch Laura’s wallet from her purse (he missed because of her sweet ninja moves), and then hung around uncomfortably close to us as we pulled makeup and costumes from the car (he smelled kinda funny too), AND THEN HE STALKED US INTO THE THEATRE! Unfortunately, Jeff and my newly acquired parkour skills were not enough to chase him away- seriously, why are we training in this if we can’t use it to fend off psychotically creepy men? Maybe we’ve been practicing wrong… We locked ourselves in the bathroom and prayed to the clown gods that this wacko was deathly afraid of clowns and would drop dead at the sight of us in our full glory.

Thankfully we weren’t put in a position to explain a corpse in the lobby of our theatre as he had disappeared while we were suiting up. (*le sigh of relief) We headed back to the car to begin the staging process of our load in. We had gotten everything out and the box partially put together when Grant, our Minion Production and Pocket Theatre liaison, comes running around the corner telling us that we had the wrong loading dock- in fact, the other one was all the way around the block! Clowns, seriously. Good thing we had all of those fringe load-ins under our belt. So 25 minutes before curtain, we load as much as we can back into the teeny tiny honda fit. Laura drives, Grant and I mule haul everything else, and Jeff literally runs after the car as Laura races around the block, trying to make sure that nothing falls out. It was quite comical. I would have taken a picture, but I was too busy hulking out under the weight of all the extra stuff.

But it all ends happily. We start the show a couple minutes late, but the clowns made it to the stage and that’s the important part. We got some laughs, got some cries, and most importantly- didn’t fall off of the box. Though there was one point that was a near, near miss- or rather, an incredible save on behalf of all three of them. And the moral of this story is- no matter how prepared you are, you must always be ready for the unexpected. As Michael Fields, a teacher of ours at Dell’arte, once said, “No one expects to step in dog sh*t. You don’t wake up in the morning and decide that’s what you’re going to do today.” It’s what you do once you step in it that counts- and for some, that’s where clown is born.

In front of us, we make guest appearances in “Sir Cupcake’s Queer Circus goes Back in Time” this Friday and Saturday and our dear old “‘Mom?” A Comedy of Mourners” appears in Falling Clown Vol. II: A Mom-entous Extrava-Gran-za! Mother’s Day Special. We will be blogging about that as it happens and then… the incredible lead up to an incredible four month tour across the country! If you haven’t been keeping tabs on us before, keep an eye out now. We’re coming to you!

MuchMuchMuchMuch Love, The Box