Swung

Friday night was the trampoline club's Christmas dinner, hosted and cooked by coach Warrick. This was a very pleasant, very drunken and above all very late event. Although it officially started at 7.30, I think we finally ate about 11, and then proceeded to play stupid games for hours and hours. By the time I got home it was after 5 am, and the state I was in was not one I could honestly recommend to someone expected to get on the flying trapeze that afternoon.

I did not sleep well.

For a couple of hours in the late morning and early afternoon I was not at all sure I was up to swinging; even just standing up and walking around seemed quite ambitious. The queasiness may have been partly butterflies, but the headache was clearly alcohol-induced. Still, the show must go on.

Ian and my mother both came to the Aerial & Acrobatic Day. So did several of the previous evening's dinner casualties, which was nice. They were very sympathetic :)

The event was typically disorganized, and various flyers had pulled out, with the result that those of us who did turn up were all merged into a single group and didn't wind up performing until about 4.30. On the plus side, this gave me extra time to get over my hangover; on the minus, it meant I was with a group of people who were mostly better than me.

Most of it actually went pretty well, but there were two nightmare moments.

The first came when the woman before me had been caught, and I found myself holding the trapeze, sharing the platform with the only other person there from my class -- neither of us ever having "given bar" before -- when the catcher shouted "Return!" I looked at Kay and she looked at me. I made a random, panicked guess at the timing and, of course, the trapeze was not in the right place at the right time for the returning flyer. Score one for the drooling idiot.

The second followed almost immediately, when I fucked up my jarret and wound up frozen in mid-air at the end of the swing, held up by the lunge ropes, reaching for the catcher but still with my legs hooked on the trapeze for several seconds, until I finally let go and was lowered ignominiously to the ground.

Now, these are not the sort of occasions where you're expected to be any good, and going wrong isn't exactly the end of the world, but it's never fun to humiliate yourself in public -- well, it can be, but let's not get into that -- and I've been kicking myself about it ever since.

I salvaged a little pride with an acceptable contretemps to finish [Warrick: "Why don't you ever do back somersaults as good as that on the trampoline?" I choose to take that as a compliment although it's not exactly unalloyed :)] but sadly, thanks to everything running so late, my mother had to leave and missed it.

The shorts were very well received, at least.

The rest of the day was fun, although a lot of the static trapeze acts were sort of dreary. It's hard to make that entertaining without being astonishingly good. The Optimists were fab though. You may not have come to drool, but I did :)
Posted by matt at December 14, 2003 07:14 PM