Jane Underwood's Open Salon Blog

Circus Mom Memories

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 11:11:48 -0500

1989: My six-year-old son Will wants me to watch him do the acrobatics trick he just mastered. I sit down on the bleachers at the San Francisco Circus Center, where Will first took a basic tumbling class a few weeks ago, and is now signed up for a slightly more advanced "Chinese acrobatics" class that I wasn't expecting but agreed to let him take because he wanted to so badly. I figure maybe he will do a headstand or a handstand or a back flip. This Chinese acrobatics stuff is all pretty new to me, as are the majority of things that have entered my life as a result of my choice to become a mom.

Will -- who is my first and only child -- is dressed in the red tee shirt and black sweat pants that all class members are required to wear. He runs over to the pole, which apparently is something they use, for some feat or other, in Chinese acrobatics classes. I don't know much about it yet. I watch as Will shimmies up this 15-foot pole like a caffeinated monkey. Impressive! I raise my hands and am about to clap, but before I can do so Will's trainer, Mr. Lu Yi, yells, "Focus, FOCUS!"

Will suddenly flips himself upside down, lifts his head, holds both his arms outstretched and, gripping the pole only with his feet, slides down it at breakneck speed, stopping only a split second before breaking his neck. I sit, frozen, mouth open into the shape of a large O, but no sound coming out of it. Adrenalin has flooded my body, my being. Oh god. Oh no. Oh yes. Oh my. Oh what have we gotten ourselves into NOW?

Will flips himself off the pole and does a bow, his face aglow with joy. That joy leaps across the space between us and enters me as well. What he feels, I feel. That's the deal, that's the surprise I was hit with the second he was born. Like it or not, I feel his joy, which has, in the blink of an eye, intertwined itself with my fear. I sense that both these feelings are are here to stay, conjoined at the hip, impossible for me to separate.

1992: Will writes in a school paper: "If I could hang a motto in every home in the world, it would say: BE CRAZY, TRY EVERYTHING. One of the happiest days of my life was when I went bungee jumping. There was a 21-foot crane. I went to the top. They tied a huge bungee cord around my ankles and told me to dive straight down, head first on the count of five. They opened a little gate, and held my waist so that I could lean out of the crane. When they got to five, I dove."

I wasn't present at the Great Bungee Jump. His dad handled that, thank god. Even now I practically have a heart attack when I think about it. The fact that I am this kid's mother is one of those cosmic jokes that the universe seems to get such a kick out of playing on people.

Until I embarked on the path of Circus Mom, I'd never even been to a real circus. Many of Will's tricks scare me, as do most energetic physical activities. I was the girl who threw her arms up and went into a sideways crouch if a ball was ever thrown my way. I was the woman who, when in labor, had to be forcefully ordered to shift my position after 22 hours of refusing to budge.

"Listen to me," snapped my midwife. "You have got to MOVE AROUND if you want this labor to progress. If you won't walk, then at least turn over onto your side. Now DO it."

So I did, and look where it got me!

First came the diapering and breastfeeding marathons. Then, as soon as I got him weaned and toilet trained, he started running around the house like a little madman, doing chin-ups and push-ups and trying to teach himself headstands and handstands. I had no choice but to enroll him in the Saturday morning tumbling class that led, through no fault of my own, to the Chinese acrobatics class.

Then came the circus school shows. At age 11, Will started performing with the New Pickle Circus. I remember his first show at the packed Cowell Theater. The band began to play, the lights went down, my heart thumped like crazy, my palms started to sweat, and for the next two hours I alternated between being the loudest clapper and screamer in the audience, and the one who squeezed her eyes shut the tightest.

For the grand finale, Will stood on the end of a teeterboard. When a man jumped on the other end, Will shot straight up, spun around in the air, and landed on the shoulders of a guy who was standing on another guy's shoulders. The audience roared.

After the show, his sixth that weekend, Will had the same dazed look in his eyes that I often saw when he was two years old, in need of a nap and determined not to take one.

"Tired?" I asked.

He looked at me like I was from Mars. "Why should I be tired?" Then he casually mentioned that he'd hurt his wrist in a fall during rehearsal and would need to ice it later.

In the morning, his wrist resembled a bruised bowling ball. At the emergency room, when our ponytailed X-ray technician learned how Will had injured his wrist, he grinned and said, "Are you a star? More importantly, are the babes asking for your autograph yet?"

2001: My 7-pound-11 ounce, 21-inch baby is now a 175-pound, six-foot-two hellabuff guy preparing to dive through a hoop balanced on top of three other hoops. It is his last performance here before he flies away to Montreal to attend L'Ecole Nationale du Cirque instead of college.

The hoops are lightweight and only two feet in diameter. They're precariously balanced. The one he's about to dive through is five feet off the ground. He is going to dive through it FEET FIRST.

Think about it.

I watch him take a deep breath and then become utterly still, supremely focused, his body collecting itself, mind/body/spirit coalescing to some pure point of containment, the mere thought of which dazzles me to the brink of tears.

A hush falls over the theater.

In a sudden burst of motion, Will runs, then leaps. His legs shoot straight out in front of him, parallel to the floor. His feet are aimed at the heart of the small hoop. He becomes a human gazelle.

His feet enter the circle. His speeding body follows, making a whoosh of wind that causes the hoops to shiver. His shoulders almost, almost touch the hoop — but DON'T! He sails the rest of the way through, lands on his feet, and the audience explodes. Every chakra in my body bursts wide open.

2003: My 20-year-old son calls from Montreal to say that he has just finished a two-day long audition for a circus extravaganza involving a gigantic water dome and seating for gazillions.

I take a deep breath and reach for my smelling salts. "And?"

"And I made the first cut, Mom."

2011: Yep, I am still a Circus Mom. I think Will might be in Paris right now. Or possibly still in Lisbon. Before Lisbon was Barcelona, before that, in no special order, was Amsterdam, Berlin, Hong Kong, Greece, Australia, Brazil, New Zealand, London. . . . the list goes on on and on.

He currently does a "hand-to-hand" balancing act with his partner, Heloise. Heloise likes to balance, in a one-handed handstand, on top of Will's head. I have a photo of her doing just that, out in front of the Eiffel Tower when they were "goofing around"one day. She also does crazy acrobatic dances with large stuffed armchairs. Will likes to toss Heloise into the sky, wait nonchalantly as she hurtles toward the ground, and catch her with a cavalier flourish right before the petrified audience has a massive synchronized heart attack.

Every once in a while my globe-trotting daredevil drops by for a too-short visit. He lazes around on the couch and leaves lots of empty water glasses sitting all over the house. Sometimes we take the dog for a stroll. Last time, we played a few games of pool at the local bar. Every now and then I tiptoe into the living room, early in the morning when he is still asleep, his feet hanging out over the edge of the fold-out couch, and I stare at his peaceful, smooth, still glowing face.

In this sliver of silent dawn, I am not a Circus Mom, I'm just a Mom. And he is not a crazy amazing circus performer, he is simply my beautiful son.

Breaking Bad Series 4 Finale - Oh Woe is Me!

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:10:10 -0400

Crap. My beloved Breaking Bad is over until its final season happens, which won't be until NEXT SUMMER. A*!hole networks and TV people, how can they make us wait that long?

I belatedly watched the last episode of Season Four, Face Off, last night.

So Gus is dead! Half his face a really big mess (gone). Thus the clever double entendre title of the episode. A shockingly satisfying demise, though I admit I will miss Gus. I will! But Walt won. Are you happy now, Walt, you egotistical maniac?

But how could it be possible that Walt might have poisoned that little boy, son of Jesse's girlfriend, with lily of the valley berries? I know Walt has been really really bad, several times to the point that I actually stopped liking his Breaking Bad-Assed-Ness, but poisoning that little boy? Surely not possible. Is Walt's mind really capable of such a convoluted and ruthlessly cold plan to kill Gus via the old "poison an innocent little boy" route?

However, by next summer will I even care about Walt's mind or motivations or emotions?

I wonder if Skyler will be skinnier by next summer. I kinda hope so, not sure why. I like her both ways. I wonder what is going to happen with Walt's son -- something's got to happen there. It's a big fat story element that needs to be tended to. And I wonder what good old Mike will be up to, once he is back from Mexico and no longer has a job working for Gus. Please, Breaking Bad writers/directors, DO bring him back to Albuquerque! Don't let Mike just fade away, gimpily limping off into some hazy Mexican saloon. That would be very bad form. We want Mike to reappear, for sure.

I wonder what our adorable hound dog-with-a-bone Hank is going to do next. That guy has a NOSE for sniffing out the coldest, deadest crime clues. Is he going to sniff out Walt? What then? Will his wife somersault back to shoplifting insanity? Or worse? I vote for worse and even crazier. :-)

And Walt again. Maybe he will become the next Big Drug Cartel Lord and Master, with Jesse as his righthand man and Skyler as his lefthand woman. . . and his son as . . . what . . . ??????? Oh his sweet son. How can they screw the son over? Please don't destroy the son, guys (or gals -- are there any gals participating in the writing of this show? I wonder.). What is the son's name? It escapes me at the moment.

I wonder, too, how Saul will end up. I love sleazy slimy tacky wacky wittily wordy Saul. He definitely remotely resembles Kevin Costner, which amuses me. I have also grown fond of Saul's hefty hard-nosed, paper-shredding, black-mailing now-unemployed secretary. Where will SHE go? I know she only plays a bit part, but what the heck, I can still wonder about her too.

I could go on and on, what's the hurry? I've got eight freaking months to wonder how it will all come crashing down . . . or not.

Just one or two or three more things: I wonder, will Jesse ever maybe become a fine master cabinet-maker and live happily ever after? Will Walt's lung cancer come back to save him from the even worse fate of Being So Damn Bad? I'm glad I don't have to wonder or worry about Skyler's ex-lover, forgot his name. He deserved to die by tripping on his fancy oriental rug and sliding across the floor and bonking his head on a coffee table leg.

Lenore Wants to Be Mad at Her Breast Cancer But...Really?

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 16:10:25 -0400

Lenore turned her back for all of three seconds, and Olivia stole one of the carrots off the kitchen counter then raced with it, deliriously happy, out to the yard. This made Lenore smile. She could never stay mad at that dog. Who could she be mad at, then? She felt determined to be mad at someone as she bit into her toast.

Post-toast, she pulled a disposable syringe out of the kitchen drawer and prepared to inject the clear liquid herbal extract into her abdomen. She unwrapped the syringe packet, snapped the top off the elixir-filled vial, stuck the needle into the vial, filled the syringe, pushed the needle through her skin, injected the immune-boosting medicine, and pulled the needle out.

Next she swigged down the last inch of French roast coffee, and then, out of nowhere, a new mood swept over her, provoked, she supposed, by a particular memory of green that brought tears to her eyes. This was followed by a stream of piano-riffy brain ripples mixed with the patter of rain hitting the skylight.

When Paul sauntered in through her wide open third-eye chakra, she felt no surprise, ran a bath, and immersed herself in a time when time had stopped, when the woodcutter held his ax suspended in midair while bees hovered halfway between nectar and hive, and she —– Paul's queen — had verged on a state of bliss.

One-by-one, a stream of magnificently inappropriate ex-lovers arrived to cast their spells. Inflamed, on edge, and tempted, Lenore absorbed their familiar voices, gestures, smells. She had no choice but to take them all in.

"Just receive me," Paul had whispered, cupping both her cheeks in his hands. "That's right, Lenore. Open yourself up and let me in.”

After her bath, she went back to the kitchen to stuff her mouth with cinnamon donuts, one after another, washed down with gulps of ice cold milk. She had to find a way to recapture all that sugar in her past, the thrill of carbs, warm, just out of the oven, soft, melt-in-your-mouth bites of heaven -- infinitely wrong and infinitely desirable. She had to get some wildness back, and she had to be mad at something she could touch or punch.

Maybe she could be mad at Jack! Sweet Jack. Maybe that would work. Oh what a despicable thought. Thank goodness he wasn't home. Thank goodness he had gone to see a man about a truck.

She brushed her teeth, leaned over the bathroom sink to spit out toothpaste and blood, and that was when she remembered that yesterday she'd forgotten to check her breasts for more lumps, new lumps. Always the threat of recurrence. She'd also forgotten to take her pills, pills that were meant to keep the prowling wolf at bay. She'd forgotten because too many people had been making demands, causing her adrenalin to flash in gaudy neon. Clients and co-workers ached inside her neck. Her arms itched. Her chin tingled with a bursting, angry garden of tiny black maverick hairs. Where were the tweezers? Finally she got dressed in the lime green Capri pants that were woven into the texture of leaves.

Her eyelids felt heavy from too little sleep. Birds thundered by outside the window. Last night she had dreamed she was flying while sitting on a straight back chair, cruising along at an altitude of approximately fifteen feet above the Valencia Street shopping corridor. She had known where she was going and why. But when she woke up, gravity resumed its hold.

Sometimes she spent whole nights listening to mysterious creaks and groans, or wandering lost and un-enrolled on college campuses, or running from humongous tidal waves. At the crack of every dawn she struggled to swim up from the murky depths, to get herself back into the light of morning coffee and pastries. Who had the answers? Death and disease had the whole world stumped.

Her breast continued to twinkle with migratory twinges and aches, unidentifiable prickles, stinging sensations that randomly came and went. On top of that, the joints in her ankles and knees were killing her, and all this stress had jammed itself inside the soles of her feet. What did these symptoms signify? Were they merely side effects from one of the medications? Or a sign of her imminent demise? She had no idea.

Too many conflicting opinions re diagnosis and treatment equaled chaos. She wished for some kind of holiness to heal her clueless body (her dear old befuddled friend, her sacred vessel, container of her divine life force). She wished for her body to be anointed with the strength it had once enjoyed, the strength of no rusty bones, no moldy flesh, no dead-end brain cul de sacs.

Once upon a time she'd boasted waist-length hair that had tumbled down to an hourglass waist. Male heads had turned when she swayed sweetly down the street, shy but hot, afraid yet bold. One admirer had called her "an incongruous collage of cool blue sky and fertile soil."

Now the orthotics from the drugstore made her hobble, every uphill walk provoked a stream of invisible tears. She clawed at the air as she dragged her feet home to the adorable house where she now lived complete with a lawn, a sprinkling system, a dog and a man who bestowed upon her many sweet pecky kisses per day.

On top of their toilet tank sat one predictable philodendron. Last week they had gone to Bed Bath & Beyond to buy a swirly green shower curtain. Their refrigerator contained homemade chicken soup. There were bananas and grapefruits and apples painting the kitchen backsplash with yellows, reds and greens.

A flock of inflammatory memories flew in a sudden burst out of Lenore's reverie, wings flapping wildly. They circled above her head, coming to roost in the eaves of her discontent. Her forehead began to vibrate and buzz until at last the buzz was muffled by the thumping of her own and her neighbors' heartbeats.

She wanted to smack the face of this faceless foe, but instead she turned on the TV that waited impatiently on the kitchen counter between the olive oil and the Vita-Mix blender. This was where she lived too much of her life these days, here in a world that had once smelled of steamy sex and drama but now reeked of Dr. Phil and Oprah, syringes and twinges and pills.

Outside the window, red rain-soaked leaves sank into the wet asphalt. Found art. She stared at it until the graveled black street became a gorgeous chatoyant blur.

Who or what could she be mad at? Who or what could she yell and scream at? It was nobody's fault. It was the luck of the human draw. No need to be mad.

So then what the hell did she want, really? Realistically? A vacation? A poem by Emily Dickenson? No. She needed more, a hammer or a flood or an out-of-control fire. . . or a bolt of lightning to blaze down and strike the soul of her mystical pineal gland. Or maybe she needed to lure the thundering birds out of the sky, make them all fall down down down until they slammed (or fluttered or drifted or sank ever so gently) into their final epiphanies.

Apropo of Nada: Five Women I Like

Thu, 6 Oct 2011 15:10:40 -0400

My title might be a lie, given that it now occurs to me that this post is my way of acknowledging Steve Job's passing. Why? Because I wasn't going to do an OS post today, until I watched the YouTube video of Jobs giving that graduation speech at Stanford. I wasn't going to work on any photography stuff, either. But after listening to Jobs, I recklessly, happily stole an hour away from my "job" job, and gave it to myself to do whatever I pleased with it. . . something I WANTED to do, something I loved to do.

I chose to spend my special "in honor of Steve Jobs" hour working on my writing and photography. Doing my creative thing.

So...aren't these five women great, each in her own inimitable way, iconic or not? (Hint: To find Woman #5, just know that she has no face, only a name. Squint or put your face right up next to the computer screen if you want to find her.)

I snapped these shots, btw, while walking down 24th Street in San Francisco's Mission District.

Musings on Love, Sex & Confusion...from the Moonlight Cafe

Sat, 1 Oct 2011 12:10:06 -0400

It was somewhere around the year 2000, give or take a year or two this way or that, and I thought, Who has time for cafes anymore? Sure, I had once hung out at cafes writing in my journals, pre-Wi Fi, but that had been back in my free-spirited twenties, before I hit the sleep-deprived haggard struggling single-mom decade of my thirties, followed by the catch-up-on-your-never-materialized-career decade of my forties.

I hadn't, however, been grocery shopping in weeks and was thus sadly down to stale water crackers and old babaganoush. So in a rare bold move, I mustered enough of my measley energy to leave the house and walk two blocks uphill to the Moonlight Café.

Inside the Moonlight, I was struck by the fact that I could feel everyone else's blood, bones, and skin. Also, it tasted like homebaked bread in there! Our collective heat pulled me out of myself. I felt that I wasn't anywhere near as alone. I sipped at this revelation as I scanned the room again, opening myself up to the possibility of a reciprocal smile.

As I ate my cheese and onion omelet, the ceiling fan spun, and a whirling pattern of light and shadows animated a one-inch puddle of coffee on my table. The puddle flickered wildly, waving its arms in excited flashes of conversation with the fan.

"So," I heard the pretty copper-haired woman to my left say to the handsome guy she was with, "were you out with another woman last night?"

My ears perked up. This was a topic I could oh so identify with. In fact, I had joined an Internet dating service just the week before and had virtually met a very cute 31-year-old with thick wavy hair down to his waist. I never could have envisioned going out with a guy 17 years younger than me who thought I was "dishy." But somehow it had transpired. We had a drink at a cafe, he walked me home, we kissed lengthily while standing in the middle of my living room, and he said, during a mid-kiss pause: "If this is supposed to be a goodbye kiss, it's very ineffective."

I never could have predicted the likes of the men I had been involved with over the prior trillion years or so. How could I have anticipated Frank and his eloquent passion for wooden boats? Or Bob and his lyrical poems about the caves of Lascaux? Or Paul and his magnificent obsession with the martial art of eskrima? Or Jim and his knack for constructing mechanical flying vulvas?

Paul knew I was as tender and sweet as a piece of chocolate cake, so he broke me apart, piece by spongy piece, put me in his mouth, held me on his tongue, made me feel airy and light.

I wanted him to eat my frosting, lick at the coat of chocolate that kept the heart of me warm - warm for him, warm for us, warm despite the slick sheen of thin ice that we walked on. I wanted his want, wanted my want, wanted us both to have our cake and eat it too.

Then bam, it was over and I was all alone and didn't know if or when Paul was ever coming back. It squeezed all the breath out of my heart.

I saw him in a crosswalk several months later. He was wearing a white polo shirt and suit pants. He didn't see me sitting there at the red light in my Chevy Nova hatchback, transfixed as I watched his body and knew that I had known that body -- had known it in every way.

To be perfectly honest, I joined not one but two Internet dating services, post-Paul. I drank tons of wine while talking to strange men on the phone, I greedily harbored emails from all men, even when those missives were devoid of pheromones. Adam disappeared from Yahoo Instant Messenger in mid-sentence. Steve said he found me captivating but then asked for a raincheck before our first meeting. Rich, his gray hair draggling dirtily down to his shoulders, was stuck in the past with Dylan, Lennon, and some old acid-dropping guru. Jed raised chickens in his Sonoma driveway.

I drifted deeper and deeper into romantic confusion. Confusion became my middle name. Confusion suffused me. Confusion was the glue that bound my life together. Confusion was the yarn with which I knit my days. It was hard to accept so much confusion. But why? Even God, slamming his gavel down time after time, couldn’t get any order in his court. So why did I expect myself to do any better? Confusion reigned. I slogged my way through it.

And then one day Joe, my next-door neighbor, showed up bright and early on a sunny Saturday morning, dressed in his crisp white painter's overalls and matching hat, ready to paint my entryway wall. Joe. Dear Joe. Unexpectedly dear Joe. Joe who became my hero and also another story entirely.

Now I know, better than I knew before, that confusion isn’t all that bad. Poets get a lot of mileage out of confusion. So do lovers. Confusion sparks our yearning for order and clarity. Confusion leads to beautiful patterns of chaos. It gives us much to strive for. It's here to stay. So I don't worry about it nearly as much as I used to. Life is good.