Safety Last, with Ben Model Riverdale, NY 1/26

Safety Last with Ben Model

Yes, it's Harold Lloyd in his iconic climb up the side of the 12-story Bolton Building, accompanied live by Ben Model, a silent film historian and accompanist for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1997 he founded "The Silent Clowns Film Series" with film historian Bruce Lawton. Ben composes all his own scores, and performs in a style that is both evocative of the silent era and also aware of a contemporary (and younger) audience's awareness of music and film scoring. Ben composes and improvises all his own scores, and performs in a style that is both evocative of the silent era and also aware of a contemporary (and younger) audience's awareness of music and film scoring. After each movie - come upstairs to our candle-lit cafe and enjoy complementary coffee, wine, and sweets before you go home for the evening.
Saturday, January 26, 2008 at 8:00 PM
Neuwirth Theatre
5625 Arlington Avenue
Bronx, NY 10471
Map & Directions
TICKETS ARE $12 and available online: http://www.tix.com/Event.asp?Event=121438

Who Put the B in Ballyhoo?

Carlyn Beccia is an illustrator and artist who is inspired by the world of the circus and clowns. She has been painting and performing various acts of circus baboonery since she was a wee young girl. She first tested her own creativity in the human cannonball act by projecting her sister across the room. Her sister had to have stitches, but Carlyn knew she was destined for circus stardom.

Carlyn attended the University of Massachusetts on a 4-year art scholarship and graduated in 1995. She has been awarded a number of awards from the Society of Children's Writers & Illustrators. She lives in Lynnfield, MA with two ferocious cats and her famous Strongman husband.

Last year she wrote a fantastically illustrated book called "Who Put the B in Ballyhoo", which is an ABC book that features the circus and the sideshow. Each of the illustrations is beautifully well done, and is clever and witty. They run the gamut from tigers to acrobats to , yes, a flea circus!


This is definitely a book worth having.

Carlyn has a website for the book http://www.whoballyhoo.com which features interactive games, a make your own circus poster game, and info about author visits.

She has a couple of other sites that are also circus oriented (listed below) In addition to being an illustrator, she is a crack web designer.

If you'd like to purchase the book, get it at Amazon.com



To find out about more about Carlyn's work, visit the websites listed below:

http://www.carlynbeccia.com
http://www.circusballyhoo.blogspot.com/
http://www.circusco.com

Peter Pitofsky

Peter Pitofsky is a Clown College graduate who is currently plying his brand of amazing physical and facial comedy to the college and comedy circuits. He lives in the Los Angeles area, and he's been in a few movies and television shows, as well as a number of live shows, including Teatro Zinzanni, Penn & Teller's Sin City Spectacular, and the movie The Aristocrats.

After seeing the video below, you'll be wondering why he's not in just about everything you see.

Among Ringling graduates and road clowns, Peter is legendary for his 108's, for his always being on, and for being one of the funniest guys on or off the show.

Here's a YouTube video that shows him at some of his funniest:
(a special tip of the hat to Pat Cashin's ClownAlley.net for alerting me to this video)



To find out more about Peter's work, visit his myspace page listed below:

http://www.myspace.com/peterpitofsky

Circus Action International

Inspired by the success of Cirque du Soleil’s “Cirque du Monde”, Ethiopia’s “Circus of Hope” and Cambodia’s Phare Ponleu Selpak, Canadian director Jerry Snell has founded another institution for Youth at Risk using Circus and Performing Arts as a tool for helping migrant and street children, working children, freed bonded labor children, trafficked and victims of slave labor in Asia and Africa. In collaboration with co founder James Tanabe, they have begun to set up CIRCUS ACTION INTERNATIONAL which is currently a network of teachers, programs, companies using performing arts and circus as an educational tool or simply a way to build confidence and resolve feelings of isolation and abandon in youth cornered by complex problems such as human trafficking, war, AIDS/HIV, poverty and political corruption.

The first conference of Circus Action International will be hosted by Cambodian Arts & Circus Company Phare Ponleu Selpak in Cambodia at their Circus Festival 3 to 6 of April, 2008 in Battambang.

If you are interested in helping to organize communications (they currently need an english to french translator) or interested in becoming a teacher in the projects in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and India, please contact Jerry Snell. The teaching projects are set to begin in July 2008. Send him your background and availability for the future, especially if you already have plans to come to Asia.

For more information about Jerry Snell or Circus Action International, visit his website http://www.jerrysnell.com or email info@jerrysnell.com

For more information about Phare Ponleu Selpak, visit their website http://www.phareps.org
It's in French, but there's an English translation.

Tears of a Clown

Sorry guys that I have been off-line for nearly a month. During the month of December, I get pretty crazy because of the New Year's Eve Festival that I direct Bright Night Providence,
and that would normally be enough to put me off of posting for a while (although perhaps not quite so long as this)

I had a personal tragedy befall me, which I'm sad to report will happen to nearly everyone, if it hasn't happened to you already. My mom passed away on December 29.

(The next part is more about her and her story, so if you are expecting anything but the tears of a clown at this point, best not read the rest of the post-- I'll start posting more clown related stuff in the next few days.)

Although I should have been expecting it (she had been sick for a number of years-- five years ago they gave her 6 months to live) but she kept on beating the odds-- she'd go in for a procedure, and it would be a success, or she'd have radiation, and not have really awful side effects (at least none that she'd tell me about)

So when she went in for a surprise late procedure on December 17 (the day I taught my final clown exam at URI) and the doctor's reported total success, I was relieved and kind of expected it. She came out of the hospital the next day (I was staying with her to do Bright Night stuff, and I picked her up, and her spirits were great, and she looked great) I didn't expect anything would go wrong.

The next morning, I woke up and realized that she wasn't awake. I checked in on her, and she seemed slumped over, and sleeping wrong. I went in and tried to wake her up, and wasn't able to get her up coherently. I realized something bad was happening, and after a brief call to her hospital nurse to ensure this wasn't normal, I called 911.

It turned out she had a pneumonia that may have been masked by a steroid she had been taking to help her breathe better. They certainly hadn't seen it in the hospital the day before.

She had to be put on a respirator to help her breathe, and they gave her antibiotics for the pneumonia. Over the next 10 days, the pneumonia was beaten down by the antibiotics, but that affected her kidney's operations. They tried to dialysize her, but when they did her blood pressure dropped precipitously low, and they had to stop. After several attempts,
the doctor's decided that they would not be able to dialysize her kidneys.

My mom had left very strict instructions that she did not want to be kept artificially alive, so knowing that, and having exhausted our medical options, we took her off the respirator, and she died about 8 hours later, on 12/29 at around 2:15 am, in her sleep and without pain. She was buried one day later on December 30.

It was pretty difficult, but I continued to work on New Year's Eve, because
a) I don't know how to do anything else. My training is, like most performers, to go on at any circumstance.
b) I am very clear that if somehow I didn't go on and make sure that Bright Night happened, that my mom would rise from her newly formed grave and smite me down.

Thankfully, my family and friends and Bright Night staff all kicked in, and helped make it possible, as I was fairly numb during the night. I'm not sure how I got through the radio and television interviews (one radio interview was at 7:10 am the morning she passed away.) but I managed to get to the other side of it.

And here I am now. My mom was very proud of bright night and my work as a performer and director (she often liked to shock people with the line "My son the clown") Other than occasionally complaining that I should either become a fulltime teacher, or at the very least, make more money, my mom was one of my biggest fans.

Hey, thank you for reading this if you have. And I promise, 2008 will have more clown stuff on these pages.