Madame Rex: Failure and Success

The failure being my complete inability to have updated on this tour. I wanted everything documented, I wanted a repeat of Europe with 2+ pages per day. Turns out the difference between a national tour with a circus company and me shlupping around Europe is: everything. Any free time I've had has been spent sleeping, eating, or rehearsing, or realizing I've never been in *insert city here* and want to walk and look at it. I've been impossible to reach. I put a temporary moratorium on phone calls.
In short, that is the failure part. The success part is everything else.

I was going to go back city by city and tell the story of that tour, but I fear that would just be the worst thing ever. So I'll start from here, because that's the only place to start from, and try and tell the truth as usual.

I'm sitting in the Miami airport surrounded by beloved colleagues, most of whom are wearing some remnant smears of eyeliner and glitter. A faded brand of "Stoli" painted on my left arm in smudged into what now looks like "Stou." Dwoira is writing in her flaming red halo. Miguel sitting upside down in a chair.l TT in an effortless pike on the carpet. Our crippled hero, Miriam, who broke her heel in the last week of rehearsal, joined us in New York wearing that big black boot they shove on you. She walks on crutches but she still tears the shit out of a trapeze.
Now that is fucking cool, in case you're not paying attention.

We're boarding now, Miami to LA. By the way, Miami is more LA than LA is. LA looks quaint after having been in the plastic paradise of Miami. On the way down from NYC, the drivers have to sleep for eight hours every so often, so we stopped in Daytona Beach for a gorgeous, rainy, hot stormy swim in the ocean day. If you're never swam in shark infested ocean water during a heavy downpour, I highly recommend it. Of course we didn't find out about the shark thing until afterwards, but the only thing anyone lost in the water was Angelo's necklace. And probably many ounces of pee.

The thing is, the very best moments I do not have pictures of, because I would have had to remove myself from the moment to capture it. Unlike Coop, I haven't acquired the skill of mastering a moment while photographing it. So the camera often stayed in the bag and I stayed in the thick of it. But I do have these:

Dwoira