(don't) lean on me

one of these men could've been me

We had quite a cultural weekend - first up we went to see a performance of FLOWN by the wonderfully named Pirates of the Carabina.

This was one of the maddest shows I've ever seen - one of those performances where you can tell how good at their jobs people are, by how easily you're able to believe that they're TERRIBLE at it.

The blurb calls it "confidently choreographed chaos", which is pretty much perfect. Performers were flying over the audience's heads on bungees as the show "went wrong" all around them. The fact that everyone was able to sing and play musical instruments while they were performing incredible physical feats was just.... teeth-gratingly annoying.

In a good way, obviously.

It was a show where you can get a bit blasé about the things you're seeing - "oh there's somebody supporting their body weight with two contact points on a vertical pole. And they're not even wobbling..." - before you realise just how incredible that really is.

Here's a trailer:


This show was the launch event for the big cultural street arts festival that I've mentioned in the past, which is on in a week or so. This is quite exhausting at the best of times, but especially so when - as has happened - the only other person who works in your department has left suddenly. This doesn't impact so much on the festival, but it does mean that there is a shed-load of work which needs doing back at work at a time when I'm traditionally run ragged anyway.

Long-time visitors may remember that one edition of this festival pretty much led me into a relapse. And I wasn't even trying to sell my house at the same time then...

Anyway - although it is undoubtedly  in the post for delivery at some unspecified point in the future - it isn't showing up if I can help it.

Anyway, FLOWN ties into the new area that we're hoping to move into at work, which is Contemporary Circus. And another part of this is a series of Street Circus events which we've been organising in our local Business Improvement District (BID). It was the last of these at the weekend so we pottered on down for it.

It was great - although I do wonder that it's not really a job for a grown-up. Plus it looks like so much hard-work - effectively each of the guys we saw was performer, narrator and audience development coordinator, all rolled into one!

We were pretty settled on a bench with a picnic lunch, and because we were pretty settled we got fairly involved with a bit of pre-show banter with the perfomers. So it shouldn't have come as a big surprise that the "big healthy-looking young-ish family man" was invited up to assist with one if the acts.

I genuinely didn't know what to do so obviously I got up and made my way onto the performing area, while our technical guy tried desperately to catch the performer's eye with the international "not a good idea" sign.

Anyway, as I made my unsteady way over to him [without using my stick, as I didn't want it to be turned into a joke], he obviously clocked my discomfort and said "Are you OK? Look, if you'd really rather not, I don't want to make it any worse...", at which point I made my excuses and sat back down.

The image at the top of this post is NOT me (although he is clearly another speccy dad of a certain age). I'm so glad I wasn't involved, otherwise we'd have all been on the floor.