pretend to be a cheerleader, save the world

The next best thing to running away and joining the circus is taking the Gold Line downtown to see Cirque Berzerk, which AK, Christine, Jody and I did Saturday night. I wore my Peninsula Gymnastics Camp T-shirt (another find from my dad’s attic) in hopes that the performers would acknowledge me as someone who could, at one point in her life, do a back flip.

Miraculously, I made it through the show without imploding from envy. Despite Chantal Durelli’s ass-kicking-pin-up-girl trapeze poses (some of which I did in my trapeze class—!—but one at a time and with a lot of grunting and resting in between).

Despite an amazing five-person trapeze act which combined extreme physical fitness and artistry with the one thing that seems more difficult in my opinion: group work.

Despite the mesmerizing splits, handstands and pretzel-bends-on-steroids performed by contortionist Hayley Kent. She was a voluptuous girl, not a skinny Ukrainian rhythmic gymnast, which is the body type I usually associate with such stunts. She moved as slowly as a sloth, and watching her was a little like watching a sloth swim: You’re amazed by the pure grace, and also by the fact that said grace is being demonstrated by a lovely but unlikely creature.

At intermission, we congregated in the beer garden—a random chain-linked section of dirt in L.A. State Historic Park, where you feel like you’ve just fallen off a Chinatown cliff and into a dreamy post-apocalypse. Even though we hadn’t had more than one beer between the four of us, we found ourselves doing stunts a la the opening act, which, despite the Tim Burton-y costumes, was 95 percent cheerleading.

Well, sort of a la the opening act.

“Okay, on three, jump up and I’ll toss you,” Christine instructed.

“Why don’t you jump, and I’ll throw you?” said Jody.

“I’ll let you throw me if I can throw you first.”

A lot of jumping and throwing ensued, preceded by a lot of instructions along the lines of, “Wait, do you mean jump on three, or wait till three and then jump?” and “There doesn’t need to be a three! It’s just one—prep—two—jump.”

AK and I tried it too, and Christine cracked up when I automatically got into cheerleader ready-position (hands on hips, smile on lips). “I guess I’m just used to her cheerleading poses by now,” mused AK.

If I do say so myself, I think the combination of Jody’s skating background and my cheer background got us some good air. And probably a few odd looks, but not that many. It was a very Burning-Man crowd.

Then the bench AK was sitting on the edge of tipped over, and a guy wearing a lot of makeup came and did some miming, and then it was time to go back inside the tent.

***

I feel about the circus the way that novelist and blogger Andrea Seigel feels about Ralph Lauren: Both represent the exotic for middle-class suburban Jewish-ish girls. If you read her entry on Lauren, you’ll see how a fetish can also save the world. For example, I paid an extra three bucks for my Cirque Berzerk ticket to buy a couple of carbon offsets or whatever they call them. (There was a giant fire-spewing contraption set up next to the tent, so our carbon emissions were pretty blatant, if spectacular.)

Okay, so Andrea’s taking things a little further: Her Ralph Lauren chair is curing cancer, and you can help, and you will be rewarded. Check it out here. A little passion goes a long way, my friends.