Re: re: December visit

Leonora Mcleod

To [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Little ones, more news!

As I mentioned in my last email, Cirque decided to take this show on the road—for the past month our route has been carving a big old smile into the bottom half of the U.S. of A. Stops included L.A., Phoenix, Austin, Huston, New Orleans, Tallahassee, Atlanta… to name a few. It’s been quite a time, I can tell you!

I thought you might be entertained by a little tale from ten days ago in Louisiana. We decided to take a scenic route, you see, through the bayou (I’ll attach pics!!), and what do you know but the tour bus broke down, so you have a group of about 40-odd musicians and acrobats and clowns and etc. all stuck out in the middle of nowhere in the marsh with nothing but a handful of snacks and a day or two worth of cocaine to keep them going (R, I think you’re old enough to hear this by now. You can’t shelter kids forever). Can you imagine!

So, we’re meant to play in Jackson that evening and the time is ticking by while the driver tries to figure out what’s up, and everyone’s been getting into makeup in the meantime because, as I’ve complained to you many times, the stuff takes three hours to put on and almost as long to wash off. So everyone’s painted to the nines waiting for rescue and finally some of the locals come out and offer us a nice dinner of crabs freshly caught that day.

Well, it started getting dark, and it’s looking like we weren’t going to make it for the show. So we got into festivities with the good people of the marsh, and I can tell you, those folks know how to party. Soon everyone’s dancing around the fire, or jamming, or cartwheeling, or triple backflipping over the flames, depending on their particular skill, and suddenly someone asks where Lena and Ivan have got to—the trapeze artists—but someone else points out they were coked out of their minds an hour ago and they’ve probably gone off to cuddle somewhere, and the night goes on.

Not long after that, we’ve lost a contortionist and a flutist and two percussionists, but everyone’s used to people passing out at various intervals at a party, and it’s not till a third of the band and both the ladies who climb the silk curtains have all gone AWOL that we realize something’s up. Well, it turns out there’s been a murderer on the loose out there for a couple of years, all kinds of disappearances up and down the coast, and he’d come out and thought all of us were sent to him by the swamp god all decked out for ritual sacrifice! Everyone panics, but it’s the sort of drunk cokey panic that doesn’t really get you far, so we mostly all just look like a crew of little children running around screaming, all dressed up for Halloween. Can you imagine!

Well, a couple of us still had our heads on straight enough to go look for the others, and we ended up half a mile away in these old stone ruins, which were decorated with all kinds of strange paintings of antler-monsters and demon hybrids and things like that, and we had to chase the fellow through the maze while he’s yelling all sorts of nonsensical things, and the bus driver, Brian, and I finally got him cornered at the end of the labyrinth and informed him that the game was up. He’d only managed to murder a few of the performers and we saved the rest (fortunately Cirque keeps a list of the scads of acrobats who auditioned and almost made the cut, and most are ready to drop their whole lives and join the team at a moment’s notice). Still, we missed the Jackson date. What can you do?

Happily, our villain was arrested and we got it all sorted out—one can only hope your own murderer back home gets sorted in the same way! (Not your murderer, goodness gracious! You know what I mean ;)

I’m terribly sorry for not keeping better contact with you all. You know how busy things can get. I’m so glad to hear you escaped that odd cult—in some ways it’s a blessing you weren’t able to send me a message while you were there, I’d have been worried sick. J, I bet you made a splendid messiah. A., I’m sure you excelled at keeping him in check. B—I mean R!—lovely work on your English paper, I never suspected Manson could be such a joy to read about.

See you dears in a few weeks!

Much love,

Mom

Leonora McLeod

Musician, composer, producer

“Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.”— Edward Bulwer-Lytton