Casual bedfellows.

April 11, Hemet, California.

The Little Sisters traveled with a mouse since Brownsville, Texas, where the circus started the season back in January. It didn't do much damage to their food supplies so they didn't mind it that much. They never even saw the thing. And they found out that it had stacked grains of rice in the rock cradle of a tiny baby Jesus plastic doll they have on the mantel around their kitchen table. It brought the rice there from a bag under the sink, little by little, accumulating a little cache, making the doll a pillow. Then it left. That rock didn't look comfortable to me either.

Physical for Dylan today, finally. $120 for 10 minutes, everything OK, he's strong as a mini horse: 7 kgs 3 (16 pounds) and 63 cm (23 inches.) "Chunky," I think the doc called him. We're trying to figure out where he gets that from, since Fridman is 5 feet 3 and an athlete with no fat to be found anywhere on his body and I'm 5 feet 2 and what people like to call petite (a broad generic adjective meaning small or short in French that is used to describe anything from a planet to a ladybug.)

Interview yesterday with Saul Perez Maro, one of the tent workers, with Jim interpreting since Saul is deaf and mute. If this was a strict journalistic piece there would be a problem here since Jim is Saul's boss, but I'm making the rules as I go, and there are no other possibilities at the circus for sign language interpreting anyway.
He had asked me to take pictures of him when he's at work, and for my project too I wanted to talk to one the three deaf and mute workers Jim brought from Mexico; I always thought they would make a great story. So the interview was for both the project and for a new section on the behind the scenes at the circus I'm working on for the Chimera web site. Turns out I was right, Saul's life makes for a typical immigrant's hard work and overcoming the odds parable, always a great story.