I am now a professional fire spinner!

Yesterday was A Different Spin's gig at Iona College. We packed our stuff, we put on our fancy clothes, we did wandering entertainment for two hours, we went and lazed at Jeremy's house for 5 hours after that playing chess and reading about Celtic Magic, then we went back and put on both of our shows, back to back.

Phew!

Let me say this: a lot of things went wrong. However, a lot of things also went right.

For example, let me set the stage: we were performing in a dark parking lot under fluorescent lights with half of our audience in front of us and half way the hell up a hill behind an iron fence. To make matters worse, the parking lot was slightly slanted downhill back towards the road. Add these factors together and you get me screwing up just about ALL of the juggling acts. 5-ball? Couldn't see them in the dark half-light. Passing? I was off-balance and dropped a ton. Torches? Any time we dropped (and we did) the torch would roll casually backwards down the hill and look like it was attacking our feet. We got a lot of shocked screams near the beginning of our fire show.

The only "real" problem, however, stemmed from the fact that our "daytime" circus show now revolves around one person always having a microphone (Jeremy's pimp wireless headset he got from working with his old circus education company). About two minutes into our show, for whatever reason, it up and died on us. No headset. No more than the people right in the front can hear us, not even if we shout.

Fuck.

We kept on keeping on, however, and for the most part everyone seemed to be having a good time. Our volunteer acts were a huge hit and all the vain attention-seekers who ran for homecoming court also got to be on stage with us, much to the delight of their school.

We cut the daytime show short at the request of the event staff (people were leaving, most likely due to them not being about to hear) and since they really just wanted to see fire anyway we obliged. This set us all a little off-kilter and made the second show a bit frantic. A few cues were missed, a few toys were dropped, but I don't think anyone lit on fire and we finished our show to uproarious applause.

The audience LOVED the fire sword fight, which made Jeremy and I very proud. They also loved the poi acts and the parts where mooch was standing on stacks juggling - so that's a compliment for all of us. After all was said and done they handed us our check (WOOT!), took our picture and one of the students working for the event asked if we'd be back next year. If that is not the true mark of success, I don't know what is!