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I've performed in Japan before, as well as many other non-English speaking countries. I find you really just have to be a bit more animated than usual. Call-and-response routines work well, if they are simple. Otherwise, I just dance around like a circus monkey and hope the crowd feels it.
In my day, MI6 - which I called the Circus in the books - stank of wartime nostalgia. People were defined by secret cachet: one man did something absolutely extraordinary in Norway; another was the darling of the French Resistance. We didn't even show passes to go in and out of the building.
All the world's a stage. P.T. Barnum: It becomes a circus. But circuses or street pageants or parades have always been useful in a society.They've always been useful as a way of critiquing power. The carnivalesque has always been useful as a way of the powerful being mocked in a public space.
I did a cake for the 60th birthday of Elton John, for Britney Spears' 27th birthday and for the 'Circus' album she put out - the cake had circus themes. I prepared a cake for a surprise 82nd birthday event for the architect Frank Gehry; the cake was comprised of mini-replicas of his buildings.
When I first started dating my husband, I had this weird fascination with the circus and clowns and old carnival things and sideshow freaks and all that. About a month after we started dating, he bought me this amazing black-and-white photo book on the circus in the 1930s, and I started sobbing.
People speak of the fear of the blank canvas as though it is a temporary hesitation, a trembling moment of self-doubt. For me it was more like being abducted from my bed by a clown, thrust into a circus arena with a wicker chair, and told to tame a pissed-off lion in front of an expectant crowd.
I'm certainly a real homebody. But the truth is that I understand that desire to, in a way, go join the circus. That's what got me out of Long Island and into show business. I was like, 'I'm just going to have an adventure. I want to be a person that isn't surrounded by their mail and their cat.'
In 1969, when I was still living in London, I had gone with some friends to see 'Easy Rider' in a movie theater in Piccadilly Circus and had returned alone some days later to see it again. It was Jack's combination of ease and exuberance that had captured me from the moment he had come on-screen.
What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. Look at us. We run a tightrope daily, balancing a pile of books on the head. Baby-carriage, parasol, kitchen chair, still under control. Steady now! This is not the life of simplicity but the life of multiplicity that the wise men warn us of.
A film set is all about hierarchy, but I always like to think about the circus. In the circus, there's this real sense of tribalism, and they're all on the road together. I don't think the ring leader is more important than the clown. They all work together, and I think that I felt that on 'The East.'
It's really wonderful to come to work and have each episode be different, in a way. They have similar structure sometimes with the villain, but we can go in any direction we want. If we want to do an episode set in the circus, we can do that. You know how precious that is. That doesn't come around a lot.
She turns her head, Bailey catches her eye, and she smiles at him. Not in the way that one smiles at a random member of the audience when one is in the middle of performing circus tricks with unusually talented kittens but in the way that one smiles when one recognizes someone they have not seen in some time.
Football was so over-awing, so intense, just everything in your life. You couldn't go anywhere, really, with my dad and the circus around football became too much for me at a young age. I fell back in love with it probably around 13-14. It was much to do with the camaraderie, the team-work and being part of a team.
I've always been entranced when it came to musical comedy; it's probably my favorite thing. It's a real true American form, and it's big, like Shakespeare big, when it's right. It's loud, and it's big: you have to be ready vocally and physically. It can bring people to their feet and can be as thrilling as a circus.
Many of the network television shows have done takeoffs on 'Family Circus,' including 'David Letterman,' 'Friends,' 'Roseanne,' and others, and, in my estimation the use of them is a compliment to the popularity of the feature, which just by mentioning it's name sets up the image of a warm, loving family-type feature.
Animal abuse is rampant in the U.S., right under everyone's eyes, for the entertainment of the public. The brutal confinement and pain of training methods of wild animals in the circus, the aquatic and theatrical shows, leads to retaliation by the animals. Eventually they find the right time to strike out, and they will.
When the NBA first resorted to it in 1979, I must admit I thought it was a circus rule, the equivalent of asking players to be shot out of cannons or swallow swords, something borrowed from the stepchild ABA with its red, white and blue basketballs. A 3-point line? The beautiful game of basketball didn't need a clown shot.
I looked at the circus, and I looked at the carnival, at the fun fair. But I looked at sleeping accommodations and decided I was too middle class to put up with that! So then I joined the theater and found I could choose my own bedroom. I loved the atmosphere. I loved that we worked till midnight and didn't start till ten.
I was always a fan of the old-style comics. I loved vaudeville. I loved Milton Berle, Dick Shawn, Phyllis Diller, Don Rickles, Charlie Callas, all those guys. Hilarious. I love the Bing Crosby and Bob Hope movies, and Abbott & Costello. My television influences were 'Monty Python's Flying Circus,' 'Benny Hill,' and 'Hee Haw.'
I thought I was going to be an actor. I liked entertaining. I was pretty much tap dancing for attention from a very early age. My family was kind of musical, and there were people in the circus next door and actors across the road. I just enjoyed messing around with music growing up, but I really thought I was going to be an actor.
I would have done well as a gypsy child, I think. A circus baby. I coulda played a great street urchin or ragamuffin. Or just been one. I certainly liked entertaining people and making jokes, but I don't know necessarily if that's what your child is prone to that you should necessarily put them in a real working industry at six years old.
I grew up in a bit of a vacuum. And as a kid, you see 'Monty Python's Flying Circus' and you're like, 'Oh, it's a cartoon.' There's mixed media. It's funny, and there's stop-motion. But as an adult, you figure it out, how the entire underpinnings of their comedy was poking fun at the rank and file of the British aristocracy and the monarchy.
Cannes is a circus, so you have to have fun with it. Everything suddenly becomes funny. And the promotion of a movie - that's where you really need to be a good actor. You need to make journalists believe that what you're saying is just for them and you've never said it before, even when you're talking about the same film over and over again.
Just as people can watch spellbound a circus artist tumbling through the air in a phosphorized costume, so they can listen to a preacher who uses the Word of God to draw attention to himself. But a sensational preacher stimulates the senses and leaves the spirit untouched. Instead of being the way to God, his 'being different' gets in the way.
Circus is what real life should be like. It's sincerity, feeling, emotions. All real. There are no lies in circus. There are artists working together to give a smile. It's a world where people help one another. It's the only show where a family, everyone from children to their grandmothers, can sit together and all be entertained by the same thing.
I grew up with the media circus. My whole life. My parents were very calm about the photographers, the fans, and all that. But I understood right away that I hadn't done anything to deserve that attention. No matter what happens, it will be there. I didn't choose it. You just can't take that too seriously. You need to live your life. And stay calm.
I'd like to see animals removed from the entertainment business. Chimpanzees and apes won't perform unless you beat them. Circuses keep elephants in chains 90 percent of the time. Elephants need freedom of movement. In circuses, they live in cramped quarters, which is not the life intended for them by nature. Some are beaten daily, forced to do ridiculous tricks and robbed of every shred of dignity.
