Ekaterina (rough draft.)

July 9, Eureka.

Ekaterina likes shoes. She buys lots of them, preferably high heels. She used to like pink but this year prefers white. She giggles a lot. She likes movies like "Girl, Interrupted" and "The Notebook." And like many other twenty-year-old girls she just wants to dance and party, stay out late and have a good time. Ekaterina is a very usual twenty-year-old, only every night she puts on heavy makeup and fake eyelashes and walks into the ring in a costume, shines and twirls and twists under the spotlights of the big top, her perfect gymnast's body defying gravity, morphology, mesmerizing.
Ekaterina came to the United States from Russia two years ago on a contract to work with Circus Chimera. She's petite, cutting a waif-like figure, a mischievous doll, with a beautiful face that reminds one of the moon, pearl-white skin, delicate (and faithfully manicured) hands, and a pouty, well-defined full mouth. There is a generosity about her, and not only because she's engaging and warm and wins you over with her looks. There's also a lightness about her, the kind that makes it impossible to be mad at someone for too long. She walks with the grace of a dancer.
She's a circus child, une véritable enfant de la balle, born and raised in the Russian circus, her father an acrobat and her mother a gymnast who went to work in the circus, met him, and never left. The circus in Russia is in buildings only, there are no tents. "But every town has a circus building, it is the tradition," says Ekaterina. She remembers vividly the first time she went into the ring. She was eleven, a tiny girl, light as a feather. "I was very nervous, I wanted to go pee, to run away, anything but go in there," she says. "My Mom pushed me in. But in there I felt like a cosmonaut, it was so big, there were so many lights."
She was back with her mother at the time, in Saint Petersburg. Her parents separated when she was three, and she never saw her father again, nor kept with his family. When she was six she went to live with her maternal grandmother in a small town in the Ural mountains; her mother had to work outside the country and decided it wasn't good for Ekaterina to be traveling, she must go to school on a regular basis. At her grandmother's she went to gymnastic classes after school - she had already started on the circus road. "When I was little my Mom prepared me for the circus, making me stretch, work out," she says, adding, "She didn't have to ask, I loved the circus." Soon the routine of rhythmic gymnastics, the hoops, the balls, poles, ribbons, all became her life: "practice, practice, practice."
When she stepped into that ring for the first time she had been back living with her mother. She had met and partnered with another circus performer, Yuri, and so Ekaterina worked her acts with Yuri. She worked on hand-balancing and hand-to-hand acts, and contortions. As they started traveling together in Russia and later around the world, in Germany, Japan, Turkey, she changed schools all the time, fitting in easily, making friends, always moving on, loving it.
"You can't say you work in the circus and that's your job, no, it's your life!" she says, emphatic. "Whether you're happy, not happy, there's a show every day, and there's action, smiles, music." When Ekaterina speaks about life outside the circus she says the other world. "In the other world I'm not happy," she says, asked what she would do were she not able to live in the circus. So dreams are all cut out, she wants to join the Cirque du Soleil. "Since I'm a little girl I just dream," she says, lingering on the word, moving her hands in a circular motion away from her face, like Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz.
The show is over, I hear the crowd applauding (there was a full house tonight.) Soon Ekaterina will come running out, and there'll be a discreet knock on the door in our trailer and we'll know it's her, the sound of her fingernails tapping, light like her, and there she'll be, freshly showered, sparkling, Come on guys!, ready to take on the night in her high heels and tight-fitting clothes, your usual twenty-year-old circus contortionist.