A promise of spring

Emerging from the cocoon of hibernation over the last few weeks, this morning has been the first of the year I have felt warm enough in the lorry to open my back windows and allow the air in.  And what an enormous pleasure it is to welcome back the sun, still with us (just) at five and beginning to show up at eight.

I have been working at the Big House.  (www.barrowmore.co.uk) I’m a concierge, which apart from being the lowest of the low, means I can get to know the residents from the floor of the house, help them take their medication, listen and talk to them, encourage them to do things and generally be there.  I have loved doing the job and haven’t laughed (and sometimes cried) so much in a long time.  Many of the men there (it’s all men) are younger than me but look a lot older as a result of tough lives, illness, disability or accident.  Their needs are great but many still have a strong spirit which only needs a focus, which I try to provide.  I have to steer an odd course between some of the staff who seem to want them to know their place and stay in it and others who want to animate and empower them.  I’m the new boy so have the expected, ‘You wait till you’ve been here two years’ comment to deal with.  Anyone know of a good response to that one?

Anyway I’m doing something right I think and it gives me (and I think will continue to give me) a focus apart from my own insatiable mind’s meanderings over the cruel months of winter. I have felt really valued which of course is an essential element of this old trouper’s needs.  I do think 2018 is starting well - I have a purpose which is a great start.

The entertainer persona of my life is doing well too with most of my customers booking me again this coming summer.  Martin will be playing at even more events this year so we will be working to integrate his unique blend of live music into the Classic and the Showbusiness Shows.  I am looking forward to that.  He has moved to Bristol now so will be a lot closer to the motorways than his previous home in Ilfracombe. He is doing a lot of his own concerts and is well on the road to re-inventing himself again.  Something we all need to do periodically.  I’m on my fourth or maybe fifth version of myself now and am becoming much better at it.  Perhaps Barrowmore is rubbing off on me.  Re-reading that sentence has the psychotherapist in me nodding and saying ‘Hmm, tell me more about that Mr Alexander’.

I have been keeping up with daily yoga and feel more flexible and stretched than I have in former winters when I have tended to vegetate and potato on the couch.  I went to a memorable and extremely useful full day meditation workshop entitled ‘Stop worrying and start living’, run by the Kadampa Buddhist organisation (kadampa.org).  I am including a short meditation in my daily routine and I find it is hugely helpful in focussing my mind and not worrying so much about the future.  I am (or maybe I should say, my last reiteration was) a terrible worrier.  I worried about so much that I didn’t have any room for dealing with what was making me worry.  Not a happy state, but one which I am sure many people will recognise.  I found a lovely quote from Seneca on Maria Popova’s superb invaluable weekly email letter (do check it out if, like me, you like to dip into wonderful quotes and mental, emotional and physical challenges), Brain Pickings (https://www.brainpickings.org ).

The first century Roman philosopher Seneca said “It is likely that some troubles will befall us; but it is not a present fact. How often has the unexpected happened! How often has the expected never come to pass! And even though it is ordained to be, what does it avail to run out to meet your suffering? You will suffer soon enough, when it arrives; so look forward meanwhile to better things. What shall you gain by doing this? Time. There will be many happenings meanwhile which will serve to postpone, or end, or pass on to another person, the trials which are near or even in your very presence. A fire has opened the way to flight. Men have been let down softly by a catastrophe. Sometimes the sword has been checked even at the victim’s throat. Men have survived their own executioners. Even bad fortune is fickle. Perhaps it will come, perhaps not; in the meantime it is not. So look forward to better things.

A good place to stop for now; looking forward to the Spring.

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander

My year in performance

On this the shortest day, it’s a perfect time to consider the last year and also to step back a couple of paces from my life and work and consider whether it is all going to plan.  Not a bad thing to do whoever you are or whatever you have chosen to spend your time doing.

In the world of my shows, the best thing about the last year was certainly working with Martin, my new accompanist.  His contribution of live and extremely lively music to the shows made for an entirely different experience for me and for the audiences.  His wide repertoire of music meant that the time between the set shows was full of marches, well-known melodies and songs from the shows.  He also brought his anecdotes and repartee to the mix, often making for twinkle-eyed banter and the establishment of a performance relationship that one audience member likened to Morecombe and Wise.  Compliment indeed.  Whether or not there is any resemblance Martin and I certainly discussed aspects of the hierarchy between our two stage personas while we rehearsed (sometimes in front of the audience) and worked on the fine detail of a new routine.  The development of ‘The Last Show of the Day’ as a double act was exciting and challenging and I think we achieved an end result which worked both in terms of the content and of the stage relationship.  Adding ‘The Pirate Song’ and ‘When you’re smiling’ to the mix was wonderful.  It was like meeting up with two old friends I hadn’t seen for ages. I can’t say my voice has improved much in the intervening years but I can present a song as a showman if not a musician, and having Martin there to pick up my musical pieces from time to time made the songs just about bearable for the audience. In that situation Martin became the master and Mr Alexander the pupil.  The hierarchy reversed.

I remember watching the three clowns in Circus Zippo in the 70s and 80s, and the way they played with the notion of hierarchy, twisting and turning the levels between them to great comic effect.  We all marvel and laugh still at Laurel and Hardy, the past masters of this theatrical notion. Pomposity and innocence are brilliant bedfellows for comic effect.  Martin and I played with this idea.  He the innocent musician, the second fiddle to the over-confident and bombastic Mr Alexander.  I even had members of the audience reprimand me for how I was to him on occasion and had to explain the intended comic effect we were aiming for, and I think at least started to achieve.  Martin is coming to a few more gigs next year.  He’s moved to Bristol, a much more accessible and dynamic place than Ilfracombe which is where I met him.  He’s really fallen on his feet there and has a very full diary of solo concerts as well as gigs with me. Check them out here (www.organfax.co.uk/players/martinorbidans/ ) and go and listen if he’s in a place near you.  He’s a master at his art.

As anyone who has seen my shows will know I don’t change them dynamically.  Although Martin and I developed ‘The Last Show of the Day’ as a new piece, it essentially contained elements of routines I have been working to recorded music for years.  The umbrella, feather duster and large pink contact ball came into its own this year, and I now feel pretty confident I can get through this complex and intricate manipulation and juggling routine with only the very occasional drop. Adding Martin’s ‘Fantasia on the Archers theme’ to it brought out the comic effect brilliantly. My shows morph gradually year on year but although I worry the audience may be bored of the same old same old, they do still come, they do still applaud and I am still booked. It’s a strange phenomenon that, even with ‘The Classic Show’ which I have been performing with more or less the same props in exactly the same order for over forty-five years now, I still find new things, mostly of infinitesimal detail, in the presentation, and I still love doing it and folk say that comes across and that it doesn’t matter that they have seen it before as each occasion is new, immediate and special for them.  That’s what I aim for.

That’s not to say I rest on my laurels.  I’ve added a routine with the Rubik’s cube to good effect after spending hours upon hours practising it until I can solve it about 3 minutes (on a good day).  I’ve added the extraordinary character of Toulouse Lautrec (see the photo on Instagram - mralexander1234), although he only made a very few outings this year.  Maybe more next.  The box he is standing on hides a hoverboard and he glides about with an outrageous ‘Hello Hello’ French accent and jokes about Brexit. He advertises Mr Alexander’s Show and hands out a flyer based on Lautrec’s famous poster for Aristide Bruand, superbly created by my artist friend Rob Symington (he who re-painted the lorry house front side, also new this year).  I also spent hours rehearsing a Multiplying Bottles effect much performed by many famous magicians over the years, but this effect didn’t even come out of its case once.  How strange is that.

The one routine which I spent a lot of time working on and did perform was ‘The Wolfgang Pauli Theorem’.  A kind of pseudo-science ‘experiment’ with flashes and a silk which flew around.  It never quite worked to my full satisfaction in performance although it almost did at the Isle of Wight Steam Show with great assistance from my friend and fellow steampunk nutcase performer Greg Chapman (www.condensedhistories.com).  It may be consigned to the museum in the corner of my workshop. 

However what did come out of that routine was the remote control flashbox designed and built by my ‘ingenieur’ Ralph.  It is really good and works every time, is safe and easy to reload.  As the climax to the (also brand new) ‘Dambusters’ routine, it adds a brilliant sparking exclamation mark to finish the preposterous RAF-dedicated hoverboard flying piece.  Again, accompanied by the wonderful Mr Orbidans, in his natural element, playing the famous march.

So is it all going to plan? Well I’m not sure what crazy fool is doing the planning but there does seem to be some sort of plan coming through it all. 

For myself, I do want to think about relocating my yard in 2018.  It’s a great place but hanging in the air even more immediately now is the likelihood of it all being demolished to make way for a posh housing estate.  So I am looking.  I don’t need much.  A yard for the lorry, with fairly easy access to the motorways, a workshop which will take the trailer and my tools and spare stuff (about 50 square metres), maybe a small office, a yoga space and a loo.  I’d prefer it to be out in the country somewhere.  I like to give back to the place I live in and am environmentally friendly as well as just plain friendly.  Any offers gladly considered…

All the best from a road near you, and whatever road you find yourself on in the new year to come, all the best from me,

Mr Alexander

Weddings, Bar Mitzvahs and Funerals

We’re stepping back a while now but I’ve had this title for a chapter sitting on my laptop and in my mind for ages and I want to complete it. 

I’ve researched the phrase which many of you will recognise but I can’t find a definitive source.  Not that it matters.  But if anyone does know where it comes from it would be good to know.  It refers of course to the cry of the Everyman Entertainer as to where he or she is prepared to perform.  I suspect very few actually have the opportunity to play at funerals although perhaps if you are a singer, a musician, then one could see situations where your services could be required.  But a juggling, unicycling magician? Perhaps in New Orleans, but rural Shropshire?

A couple of months ago I had a call from a woman who had a close friend who had recently passed. (I quite like that expression, better, I think, than most of the others.  ‘Passed away’ seems a bit distant and none of the others really work for me.  Of course ‘died’ is accurate but too cold and final for me, even though death is of course cold and final).  Anyway Mr C. (everyone just knew him as Mr C.) though his name was Michael Cartwright, had been a big jovial man who even in his later years loved going to the circus.  If there was a circus locally, he had to go. There was some circus blood in him, having grown up in and around Chipperfields where his father had worked.  The lovely woman who phoned me had worked for Gandy’s Circus, with her horses, so there were circus connections.

Would I be able to perform at Mr C.’s funeral?  Or perhaps more accurately at the celebration of his life at the village pub afterwards? Of course a gig is a gig so I said I would be honoured to do so, which was true.  When I put the phone down I started to worry.  I’m a born worrier.  I was worried about what to do, I was worried whether those present would find the intrusion of an entertainer on moments of personal grief, minutes after they had seen Mr C. laid in the earth, too much or even an unwanted intrusion.  I gave what I should do a great deal of thought.

Firstly, I thought that working outside the pub would be better than inside.  At least then if people didn’t like what I was doing they didn’t need to take part.  Then, I went through my music to find the most appropriate tracks.  ‘March of the Gladiators’ seemed OK.  It seemed appropriate.  He had been a gladiator of a man, tall and broad in mind and body.  As luck or fate would have it the day was sunny and dry.  One of those autumn days in mid-October when the sun still had some warmth.  The front of the pub in the little Shropshire village faced South so the day’s sunshine bathed the entrance and me in light. I set up the few props I had brought alongside my sign board and wrote ‘A celebration of the life of Mr C. (who loved circus)’ (see the photo on Instagram –mralexander1234) and played ‘The March of the Gladiators’ and juggled as the guests walked back to the pub from the cemetery just down the road. There were many in tears, but, being someone who can gauge reactions pretty quickly, I really only noticed one or two who found my presence there upsetting or out of place.

I worked outside the pub all afternoon.  People drifted in and out.  There were a handful of children.  The small Welsh border town was one of those places where children were sheltered from life’s difficult moments like funerals, but some came later after school and some older and younger children were there throughout, so I had a few children to play to along with the adults.  Children are great ice-breakers in any social situation, including the odd one of an entertainer and an audience. Even more so on occasions like this when the span of life is so tangible.

I heard various stories about Mr C. during the afternoon.  How when he was told he had a terminal illness by the Doctor, he stood up, shook him by the hand, thanked him and said he’d had ‘a wonderful life’.

How on his birthday a month or so later, when he was too ill to get out of bed, he had organised a party for his friends and family complete with a live strolling Mexican band who had played around the house all evening.

I felt I had got to know him by the end of the afternoon and as people had mellowed with a few drinks, various key people in his life, his daughter, his wife and others drifted out to catch some of the show.  They all thanked me and said how good and appropriate what I had done had been.

So now I feel OK with using the well-known phrase ‘Weddings, Bar Mitzvahs and Funerals’.  I have performed at many weddings, a few Bar Mitzvahs and one memorable funeral.

Rest in Peace (or perhaps with the echoes of ‘The March of the Gladiators’), Mr C.

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander