![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraJump: Omak, WA → Oroville, WA – City Park: 45 miles
LEFT out of the park where we came in…
Arrows back to HWY 97 NORTH to Oroville
Follow arrows to a careful LEFT turn into the lot in town
Chantal is teaching Robin how to eat fire.
“She says I’m the logical heir to her legacy,” Robin told me smugly. “Since I’m unbelievably good-looking, fabulously intelligent and utterly fearless.”
“Chantal eats fire?”
“It’s her favorite act. She likes it better than the trapeze even. But Chance won’t let her do it. He says it’s too dangerous.”
“How dangerous is 'too dangerous?'”
“It’s not really dangerous,” Ben interjects hastily. “Not if Robin follows Chantal’s directions to the letter.” Ben has a lot invested in creating a successful circus dynasty.
Robin following directions… Now that would be an act worth paying big bucks to see!
The original plan called for Robin to be performing on the show for which Chance Van Zandt was prepared to pay him $150 a week. A classic Houdini escape act with handcuffs and a throwaway key. A sword-through-the-neck illusion. But even on Fellini & Pendergrass where performance expectations are – uh – laid back shall we say, Robin’s acts were sloppy. He needed practice. Hours and hours of practice.
Homey don’t do practice.
If it doesn’t come naturally to Robin, if it was not among the blessings bestowed upon him by good fairies at the hour of his birth, then Robin just won’t bother with it.
This species of arrogance is bound to fuck you up later in life, I long to tell him but Robin is way past the stage of listening to any of my cautionary life admonitions. We’ve become tight again in the last week or so, we have long conversations about life, about history – Robin is a history buff, a true connoisseur of dynasties' rises and falls. Also we play Sims which is kind of like play therapy. "My Sims kid just murdered his mother because she forced him to do three hours of algebra," Robin tells me blandly. "It was a long and painful death."
"Oh yeah?" I say. "Well I just locked my Sim kid in a room without windows or bathrooms. He keeps peeing on the floor. He's becoming psychotic. See, I think there are tortures worse than death."
Whatever else may come or not come out of this time on the road, I think it will have brought me closer to my youngest son, and that makes it worthwhile – he was definitely floating away from me for a while there.
Since the illusions fell through, Robin is thinking about a sideshow. We have this thing, another refugee from Brill’s Bible. It looks like a mummified mermaid dwarf, Jake the Alligator Boy’s sister. “I’ll set it up and you can be the barker,” Robin says. “And we’ll charge people a buck to see it. And I’ll split the earnings with you, sixty-forty.”
“Who gets forty?”
“Well, me, of course.”
“But I’ll be doing all the work!”
“Yes, but it will be fun for you,” says Robin. “You can dress up like a gypsy and wave your hands all around the way you like to do. You’re good at talking to strangers, Mom, you know you are. You’re so… charismatic!”
He makes absolutely no attempt to mask his manipulativeness and so it's charming. Or maybe you have to be his mother.
“What will I say?” I ask.
“Well, you can say you found it in the bottom of a lake near Chernobyl where all the butterflies have three wings and the snakes are growing legs. That it’s a mutant. And that they should start worrying about the bottoms of lakes here. It’s about selling the fear!”
“That’s a great rap! Why don’t you be the barker?”
“I don’t like to lie to people.”
We’re still hashing the logistics of this one out. Frankly, I don’t see myself as PT Barnum.
But if Chantal can teach Robin how to eat fire well, that will solve Robin's cash crunch.
###
Traditionally circus owners are ver-r-ry secretive about the routes their shows travel. If a route is publicized too far in advance, so the thinking goes, some cheap Mexican troupe will swoop in three days before you’re booked, steal your box office with an arthritic elephant and a couple of drunks riding motorcycles in a cage.
But Chance van Zandt – perpetually disgruntled owner of the Fellini & Pendergrass Circus – takes stealth to the extreme. Frequently people on the show don’t know where they’re going till six o’clock in the morning the day they actually go, and this turns car maintenance into a game of suspense: the weird rattle that’s safe to ignore on a 20 mile jump can easily turn into a cracked block when the jump stretches to 120.
All this enhances Scott-the-Mechanic’s status as the Most Important Person On the Show. And the one who's making the most money.
###
Omak, Washington – yesterday’s town – lies partly within the Colville Indian Reservation. The Okanogan River acts as a boundary between Indian and paleface parts of town. Omak’s historic downtown is on the paleface side. (It has an organic food store! And two – count ‘em! – bookstores!) The Stampede Grounds (where we pitched the circus tent) is on the Indian side. Half a mile away from city center, also in White Folk Land, sits the fabulous WalMart Superstore and attendant satellite businesses – Burger King, MacDonalds, Home Depot, KFC as well the Starbucks in which I sit typing. People here – both white and Indian – are pleasant and friendly. I suppose proximity to the casino in nearby Okanogan ensures jobs and a cash flow. Both Oldtown and Newtown stores seemed prosperous.
The Omak Suicide Stampede is a middling famous horse race modeled after a rite of passage the Indians participated in for centuries before the Grand Coulee Dam flooded its course. Horses and riders race 100 yards or so down an almost vertical bluff, then plunge into the icy-cold Okanogan river, swim across, and storm a finish line 500 feet distant. The race can be brutal – twenty horses have died since 1980. A few humans too. That’s why the event takes place on Indian territory – it would be illegal in the United States.
###
Yesterday I finished Alice Hoffman's Turtle Moon. Prose was lovely but book suffered from a major identity crisis: did it want to be a lyrical crime novel or a smooshy Oprah book? Of course, it wants to be the latter, a decision I can respect. But I kept wondering what might have been since crime novels are so close to my heart and Hoffman wrote some nice, taut dialog:
"I know that now," Julian admits. "You're too busy looking for the dead girl."
"Woman," Lucy says.
"Around here we call each other boys and girls," Julian says. "Since growing up is such a tragedy."
I suppose I'm officially on a Hoffman reading binge.
LEFT out of the park where we came in…
Arrows back to HWY 97 NORTH to Oroville
Follow arrows to a careful LEFT turn into the lot in town
Chantal is teaching Robin how to eat fire.
“She says I’m the logical heir to her legacy,” Robin told me smugly. “Since I’m unbelievably good-looking, fabulously intelligent and utterly fearless.”
“Chantal eats fire?”
“It’s her favorite act. She likes it better than the trapeze even. But Chance won’t let her do it. He says it’s too dangerous.”
“How dangerous is 'too dangerous?'”
“It’s not really dangerous,” Ben interjects hastily. “Not if Robin follows Chantal’s directions to the letter.” Ben has a lot invested in creating a successful circus dynasty.
Robin following directions… Now that would be an act worth paying big bucks to see!
The original plan called for Robin to be performing on the show for which Chance Van Zandt was prepared to pay him $150 a week. A classic Houdini escape act with handcuffs and a throwaway key. A sword-through-the-neck illusion. But even on Fellini & Pendergrass where performance expectations are – uh – laid back shall we say, Robin’s acts were sloppy. He needed practice. Hours and hours of practice.
Homey don’t do practice.
If it doesn’t come naturally to Robin, if it was not among the blessings bestowed upon him by good fairies at the hour of his birth, then Robin just won’t bother with it.
This species of arrogance is bound to fuck you up later in life, I long to tell him but Robin is way past the stage of listening to any of my cautionary life admonitions. We’ve become tight again in the last week or so, we have long conversations about life, about history – Robin is a history buff, a true connoisseur of dynasties' rises and falls. Also we play Sims which is kind of like play therapy. "My Sims kid just murdered his mother because she forced him to do three hours of algebra," Robin tells me blandly. "It was a long and painful death."
"Oh yeah?" I say. "Well I just locked my Sim kid in a room without windows or bathrooms. He keeps peeing on the floor. He's becoming psychotic. See, I think there are tortures worse than death."
Whatever else may come or not come out of this time on the road, I think it will have brought me closer to my youngest son, and that makes it worthwhile – he was definitely floating away from me for a while there.
Since the illusions fell through, Robin is thinking about a sideshow. We have this thing, another refugee from Brill’s Bible. It looks like a mummified mermaid dwarf, Jake the Alligator Boy’s sister. “I’ll set it up and you can be the barker,” Robin says. “And we’ll charge people a buck to see it. And I’ll split the earnings with you, sixty-forty.”
“Who gets forty?”
“Well, me, of course.”
“But I’ll be doing all the work!”
“Yes, but it will be fun for you,” says Robin. “You can dress up like a gypsy and wave your hands all around the way you like to do. You’re good at talking to strangers, Mom, you know you are. You’re so… charismatic!”
He makes absolutely no attempt to mask his manipulativeness and so it's charming. Or maybe you have to be his mother.
“What will I say?” I ask.
“Well, you can say you found it in the bottom of a lake near Chernobyl where all the butterflies have three wings and the snakes are growing legs. That it’s a mutant. And that they should start worrying about the bottoms of lakes here. It’s about selling the fear!”
“That’s a great rap! Why don’t you be the barker?”
“I don’t like to lie to people.”
We’re still hashing the logistics of this one out. Frankly, I don’t see myself as PT Barnum.
But if Chantal can teach Robin how to eat fire well, that will solve Robin's cash crunch.
Traditionally circus owners are ver-r-ry secretive about the routes their shows travel. If a route is publicized too far in advance, so the thinking goes, some cheap Mexican troupe will swoop in three days before you’re booked, steal your box office with an arthritic elephant and a couple of drunks riding motorcycles in a cage.
But Chance van Zandt – perpetually disgruntled owner of the Fellini & Pendergrass Circus – takes stealth to the extreme. Frequently people on the show don’t know where they’re going till six o’clock in the morning the day they actually go, and this turns car maintenance into a game of suspense: the weird rattle that’s safe to ignore on a 20 mile jump can easily turn into a cracked block when the jump stretches to 120.
All this enhances Scott-the-Mechanic’s status as the Most Important Person On the Show. And the one who's making the most money.
Omak, Washington – yesterday’s town – lies partly within the Colville Indian Reservation. The Okanogan River acts as a boundary between Indian and paleface parts of town. Omak’s historic downtown is on the paleface side. (It has an organic food store! And two – count ‘em! – bookstores!) The Stampede Grounds (where we pitched the circus tent) is on the Indian side. Half a mile away from city center, also in White Folk Land, sits the fabulous WalMart Superstore and attendant satellite businesses – Burger King, MacDonalds, Home Depot, KFC as well the Starbucks in which I sit typing. People here – both white and Indian – are pleasant and friendly. I suppose proximity to the casino in nearby Okanogan ensures jobs and a cash flow. Both Oldtown and Newtown stores seemed prosperous.
The Omak Suicide Stampede is a middling famous horse race modeled after a rite of passage the Indians participated in for centuries before the Grand Coulee Dam flooded its course. Horses and riders race 100 yards or so down an almost vertical bluff, then plunge into the icy-cold Okanogan river, swim across, and storm a finish line 500 feet distant. The race can be brutal – twenty horses have died since 1980. A few humans too. That’s why the event takes place on Indian territory – it would be illegal in the United States.
Yesterday I finished Alice Hoffman's Turtle Moon. Prose was lovely but book suffered from a major identity crisis: did it want to be a lyrical crime novel or a smooshy Oprah book? Of course, it wants to be the latter, a decision I can respect. But I kept wondering what might have been since crime novels are so close to my heart and Hoffman wrote some nice, taut dialog:
"I know that now," Julian admits. "You're too busy looking for the dead girl."
"Woman," Lucy says.
"Around here we call each other boys and girls," Julian says. "Since growing up is such a tragedy."
I suppose I'm officially on a Hoffman reading binge.
