Monday, Wake Up! Drunken Disco Dudes Steal Circus Llama ... Big Top Therapy Hits Sarasota ...Circus Silly -- Kid Shows to Geeks, Freaks and Goons. They’re All on the Inside!

Night out on the Circus:  Bordeaux, France scene of silly crimes: Five drunk disco dudes, bored, stealing away a Llama from a French-Italian circus, taking it for a streetcar ride.  Chased by police, thieves escaping off to a place called Comedy Plaza.  Circus owner drops charges after Serge (the llama) is returned to the ring, causing an uptick in business.  Anything to get warm bodies into cold seats.  “I have nothing against these lads,” says owner, charmed by the theft’s unintended consequences. Makes me wonder if so whimsical an act wasn't staged as performance art?  But don’t count on Serge making it into next year's Monte Carlo Circus Festival  ...

A new breed of big top bureaucrat on the rise:  Heck with the phone rooms, turn yourself into a “conservatory” and go for corporate funding, et all.  Big top as therapy is the latest greatest angle.  Out of work, over the tent performers finding lucrative callings in bogus self-help classrooms, public sector funding a boon..  Remember Circus Sarasota?  It's now “The Circus Arts Conservatory.”  Seems they have so many many vital things to do -- people to rescue, self-esteems to save, causes to address in sympathetic spangles -- that “circus” is a narrowing insult.  If lucky, they might get pitch time on the Pledge Break Society (PBS), offering  more big top broccoli in lieu of the hated cotton candy stuff.  Freshly repentant group traces its roots back to the Sailor Circus.

Giddy kiddie ring romps, adult discretion waived:  Kevin O’Keefe is, to my fleeting fickle eye, a likable-looking oddball, working out of New England, operating five entities, vaguely alluding to circus fare by and for the young, under his wacky umbrella, Circus Minimums.  One of them being his break-out One-Man Circus-in-a-Suitcase, which tours, no surprise, schools, theatres, and community centers far and wide.

Born on a sidewalk:  O'Keefe claims to have  "discovered" Circus Minimums laying  inside a suitcase outside his New York city apartment in 1985. In it, he says, was everything he needed to perform minimally around the world. Other subsidiaries, since crafted and christened, include Time Machine Circus, Circus Yoga and the Human Body, and, if  “body” puts you off, there’s Circus Yoga and Life Sciences.

Sigh.  New England, say what you will, is alive with experimentation.  I’m starting to feel outdated in my non-conservatory patronship of Cirque du Soliel.  How cutting edge it once seemed.  How suddenly old hat it may risk becoming.  You read it here.  The ticket I ordered on-line to their latest, soon to tent up over the land of the rich - San Francisco, cost me $90.00.   I shunned a cheaper ceiling seat at  $70 a cling, not feeling up to straddling myself to a girder over the back door entrance. But, but, good news!  At check out, NOTHING was added onto my clean $90.00.  And that made me feel deceptively wanted.

Broadway bound, they're puffing! The daring Broadway musical of 1997 about Siamese twins that wowed some New York  critics, but not the public, Sideshow, getting a new "re-imagined" staging with director Bill Condon at the helm, for the La Jolla Playhouse in S. Diego area.  After Sideshow, Condon slated to rewrite screenplay for a movie musical to be filmed by 20th Century Fox about P.T. Barnum, to star Hugh Jackman as  the legendary showman.   Both shows featuring Siamese twins. Wonder if either will offer university credits?

Circle of Fame ringmaster: Paul Binder

Sarasota Circle of Fame inductees.  On principle here —  they have to pay for their own plaques, shame on the mock selection committee!  And a few don’t really belong there, okay, in my outrageous opinion  — so, this time around, I'm only naming those who rise to my personal bias, if that's how you wish to see it, and here they are:  Pinito Dol Oro and Paul Binder.  I didn't diss the others; in fact, the Therons should probably be here. See how kind I can be?   That’s what I’m learning at my  local Big Top Therapy, Attitude Readjusment, Membership Pledge Extraction, and Rebirthing Conservatory.

P.S.  I love Pinito.

In a word:  surreal