I'm a mime!

Yes, that's right folks, I performed in white-face last night with a bunch of Indian mimes including the great Jogesh Dutta. Of course, you're all saying, "Wow, that is so cool and exotic, she has such a glamourous life!" And to that, I say, it actually went something like this: get to mime school at 2 PM, wait around while the other mimes load stuff into a car, pile into into the car (with too many other people, so it's a bit of a squeeze), drive for an hour to a festival outside of Kolkata (very small, think 2nd rate carnival in the US), wait around while they set up lights and stuff, get bitten by gazillions of mosquitos, think "Well, if I get dengue fever and die at least I will have performed with Jogesh Dutta!", wriggle into a ridonkulously tight leotard (they showed it to me and said, "This is a strange piece of clothing, your legs go here..." ha ha if you know me at all you'll know that leotards and I are best buddies), sit around and watch the mimes do their make-up (which is really cool, by the way: there's something about the make-up that transforms a person's features, so my friends suddenly looked nothing like themselves), sit around and get my make-up done, pose for pictures (which will appear as soon as I get to the states: they decided to have some fun with the camera, ha ha), warm up, pace around back-stage waiting for our turn to perform, do the show (I did practically nothing, just holding signs and a bit of flying, hee hee, but it was amazing to see what everyone else can do: they're quite incredible), bow etc., take off the make-up (interesting fact: they use coconut oil for this), pile back in the car, drive home while eating Indian sweets (dinner! mmmmm....), get home at midnight, collapse. So yeah, as you can see it was mostly waiting around. But I love hanging out with those guys, they're really funny and nice, and totally dorky in a really awesome mime-ish sort of way. We joke around in gestures, which makes the language barrier unimportant: it's so refreshing, to share humor with Bengalis! Most of the time the jokes just go totally over my head.... But yeah, they're really nice, and they're throwing me a dinner party tomorrow, which will probably consist of them making me say stuff in Bengali and being highly amused that I can say, "I have a little sister" and stuff like that.
In any case, hanging out with them makes me miss my circus folk... but hey, I'll be seeing you all soon! Come to Swat graduation weekend, anyone who's in the area, because there's gonna be a party in the big studio, and Gloria will be the guest of honor! ;)