California State Fair

We've made it to the halfway point of the State Fair! Yay!

Our show has been rockin', and the audiences are really a lot of fun. The only major drawback is the heat - yesterday it was up to 104 and we were melting on that hot, hot stage. When it gets that hot, we have to be extra careful and aware since accidents are all lining up to happen. Fire tools are igniting early, as soon as they get anywhere near a fire source, the bright sun makes it hard to see lingering flames, and the heat makes us feel heavy, sleepy and a little clumsy. We're drinking gallons and gallons of water and sweating it all right out again, so overall I imagine this is good for us in the long run, even if it's not a whole lot of fun in the meantime.

The weather report says today will be cooler, and Monday through Friday looks to be way down in the 80s. We are keeping our fingers crossed. :) At least the evenings have been beautiful - we have a longer break between our last two shows and have taken to wandering around the fair at dusk, seeing the other shows and taking silly pictures and looking at all the animals. Our favorites: newborn piglets, the garden of gigantic proportions, and Frank Olivier's Twisted Cabaret show.

The Sacramento media has found us, and we've gotten to do a couple of TV spots, with one more scheduled on Monday morning. Here's a link to our favorite one!

State Fair Diaries

We made it through Day 2 of the California State Fair! :) 2 days down, 16 more to go. Here's hoping we don't melt into little puddles or burn ourselves crispy in the process!

We're doing 3 or 4 shows every day - at 4, 6, and 9 pm on weekdays and 2, 4, 6 and 9 on the weekends. Our shows are a half hour long, so that means 2 full hours of fire on the weekends - exciting, and also exhausting!

Friday it was *really* hot. We got in and found our site, after much wandering around carrying gallons and gallons of fuel. We are sharing a trailer with the African Acrobats, in the Weird, Wild and Wacky zone right in the center of the fair. There's also an awesome magician and a bird show right in our area, so there's a lot going on and things were pretty crazy the first day. Also, did I mention it was HOT?

Our stage is really awesome. It's... well.. wacky, with a funky corrugated-metal-and-mirrors look. It is also a nice reflecting mirror, so the Sacramento summer sun can get us from 3 sides instead of just one, while we help by twirling huge fireballs around. The first day we sweated and panted through our daytime shows, rocked the nighttime show, and then dragged home and collapsed.

Saturday was much better - the weather was cooler, the audiences were bigger, and we weren't feeling so off-balance - we knew where the stage was, where the water was, and where to find air conditioning and iced coffee. Also, after just two days we've performed this show seven times, and it just gets tighter and sillier every time. At the end of the first day we knew all the things we needed to change. At the end of the second day, we know all the things we want to develop. By the end of today we're going to be Vegas, Baby.. and by Labor Day, the WORLD. Muahahahahaaa..

I'm looking forward to the opportunity to create and try out a lot of new choreography, as will inevitably happen when we get sick of doing the same show over and over. I'm doing fire hula hoop for this show, which is fairly new to me, and I'm enjoying it a whole lot (last night a little girl came up to me after the show and told me the hula hoop was her favorite part! I must be doing it right!).

If anyone wants to come out and see us, I really recommend coming to the 9:00 show - it's dark so the fire shows up, it's not so hot, and we seem to regularly ROCK that show!

I will post some pictures soon, and stay tuned for more wacky adventures to come. :)

San Mateo County Fair

We do a lot of private parties, and people are often asking me where they can see us perform in public.. well, tonight is the night - the first of many!

We'll be performing tonight at the San Mateo County Fair at 9:00 PM on the Carnival Borough Stage. If you can't catch us tonight, we'll also be there tomorrow (Sunday), as well as Wednesday and Thursday the 19th & 20th.

San Mateo County Fair

Then, starting on Friday we'll be at the California State Fair in Sacramento. We'll be doing 3-4 shows a day, every day from 8/20 - 9/7 in the "Weird Wild and Wacky" area.. shows will be at 4, 6, and 8 pm with a 2:00 show added on weekends and holidays.

California State Fair

Please come on out and play with us!

That 70s Show

Yesterday I had a pretty unusual show - it was a blacklight / glow light show for kids at a summer camp at Club Sport in Fremont. The summer camp theme was centered around the decades of the 20th century, and for a blacklight show, I was assigned the 1970s.

What fun it was! I got to dance to great songs like "I will survive," "Dancing Queen," and of course, "Greased Lightnin'" from the Grease soundtrack. It was also my very first public hula hooping performance (I recently got a blacklight reactive hoop and so was very excited to try it out). It went really well!

I feel oh-so gutsy, being brave enough to perform a hula hoop routine for the first time ever, in front of a big group of 7-12 year old girls.. ALL of whom could probably hula hoop me right out the door. But they loved it.. and I knew a trick or two that some of them didn't, so they were duly impressed. :)

I also had the opportunity to perform with my new amazing light poi. A friend made these for me recently. They are about 5x as bright as any other light poi I've ever seen, let alone owned, and are programmable (!!!) so I can make them do pretty much whatever I want - colors, strobe rates, brightness, patterns.. there's even a music reactive mode, where they listen to the ambient sound and flash accordingly. Amazing! And they're controlled by a remote control, so my tech guy can make them change on the fly. The kids went crazy!

The third new thing were the Dancing Wings I got at Faerieworlds.. these are amazing. They're a beautiful costume addition, a very easy performance tool, and they were everyone's favorite thing! With light shows I let the kids play with the lights after I'm done dancing, and the kids wouldn't put these down. I got the black light reactive ones in green, and let me tell you, they SCREAM under UV light.

I really need to get some photos of all the new stuff, but black light is notoriously hard to photograph or videotape. If you're local and wanna help, please drop me a line!