Cirque du MS

by Dean Kramer
August 2004

 Last Sunday I took a day trip with Twink and a friend of ours. We hooked up with my family in a major city about 2 hours from Cripple Creek and saw Cirque du Soleil. Twink and I are Cirque junkies. We’ve watched it on the Bravo channel and have been to other live shows when they are in towns close enough to drive to.

The people who administer Cirque du Soleil very considerately seat people in wheelchairs in the first two rows at a greatly discounted price for both the disabled person and an able-bodied companion. If you have reserved wheelchair seating (which also applies to canes, walkers, and those who simply cannot climb stairs), you are asked to arrive an hour before show-time.

We did so and sat, I in my wheelchair and the rest of us on benches, chatting happily until the performance tent was opened. As often happens, able-bodied people would walk past me and, if we made eye-contact, smile in a sad way as if to say, “Poor woman. Alas, your dreams of becoming a Cirque du Soleil artiste have been crushed by cruel circumstance.”

Continuing the fantasy in my mind I’d reply, “How do you think I GOT this way?”

The show was breathtakingly wonderful, as always.

Afterward we hung around outside on the show grounds discussing where to have dinner. My sister asked to borrow my cell phone to make reservations. The environment was saturated with urban noise and music from the show, she was unfamiliar with my phone, and I had wheelchair gloves on my already numb fingers. We took turns staring at the phone uncomprehendingly, pressing buttons, looking puzzled, holding it to our ears, shaking it, looking puzzled again, and offering it to each other with imploringly hopeful gazes. At some point it occurred to us that we looked and felt like a pair of Cirque clowns doing a performance piece.

This realization brought us great mirth and reminded me that when I was very small I used to come home from a Saturday movie matinee in the character of the movie’s hero (there were few heroines in those days). So, for a week I might be The Nutty Professor, the Swamp Fox, some cowboy or other—whatever I’d seen, that’s who I became. It was particularly distressing to my mother when the movie had an animal as the main focus. I was useless for days after Old Yeller.

For the rest of that Sunday and for a few days thereafter pretty much everything I did as a disabled person was accompanied in my mind by the wailing, wordless vocals, rhythmic music and applause of Cirque du Soleil. It went like this…

Monday morning I got out of bed and started toward my desk across the room. Spasticity and poor balance, made this, my first walk of the day, a dangerous high-wire balancing act. The audience, Twink and the dogs, held its collective breath wondering, "will she make it without falling?" (The dogs wondered, "will she make it without falling on US?") I teetered. I tottered. I listed to the left and corrected to the right. They gasped and two of them jumped to safety on the sofa as I spun a full 360 degrees. But I did not fall. And then, Ta-da! I was on the other side of the room! How exciting! (Applause).

Cirque du Soleil almost always includes people who can twist themselves into amazingly contorted positions, often upside down, forcing themselves through hoops while balancing one-handed on a small post which they cause to rotate. I identified closely with those athletes when, that same morning, I sat dizzily with numb fingers and leaden legs removing my sweatpants (the kind with elastic around the ankles) so I could dress for work…

Balanced precariously on the edge of the bed the contortionist wriggles so as to slide the pants to her ankles. It’s an easy enough maneuver but she makes it look difficult. She gives several (increasingly vigorous) kicks but the pants don’t slide off. Instead, they now appear to be hopelessly tangled around her (inflexible, spastic) feet. She’ll never be able to get them off. It’s impossible. But wait! She’s shaking her left foot hard. She’s shaking it really hard and look! The pants are coming off her foot! Now she’s using her freed left foot to push the pants off her right foot! She’s done it! She actually got the sweatpants off! This show is amazing! (More applause).

The thrills weren’t over yet, though …

A little later, I dropped something on the kitchen floor and knelt to retrieve it. The audience watched raptly as the incredible disabled woman attempted to lift her own weight in weight off the floor and return to a standing position. Slowly, she hauled her knees into place, planted her hands and pushed. Uh-oh! Almost, but not quite. She sank to her knees again. Breathing deeply she repositioned her body, placed her hands on the floor and, with a superhuman grunt of effort, voi-là! She was up! Have you ever seen anything like that? (Deafening applause).

Of course, if I’d fallen again, rolled around on the floor for awhile, pulled the tablecloth and crockery down trying for leverage, and ended up asking Twink to aid me (pulling her to the linoleum as well) that would have been a Cirque clown interlude. At Cirque du Soleil clowns will come out after a serious performance and, via exaggerated mimicry, mock whatever the performer has just accomplished. Living with me and my MS, I and my family experience many clown interludes. So many, in fact, that you can’t really call them “interludes.” At Cirque du MS they are, in truth, the main event.