Starting over.

Jan. 31, Brownsville.

The show starts tomorrow - Happy Dayz! -, and so does the season.
For seven days a week it will not stop until mid-November, unless some major accident happens, presumably. The rest of the crew arrived during the night, familiar faces everywhere, Chago, Araceli, Jose the mechanic, el Chivito and Edith and Jose Ivan, "the other baby," whom we didn't get to see yet, he was sleeping, and suddenly it feels like I've never left. I'm beginning to wonder if I'll come back after the birth of Fridmanito Junior II or just stay put. Missing the circus from the visiting lecturer in photojournalism position on the sunny Riviera was easy; daily life at Circus Chimera on the road is not, much less with a toddler and a newborn in tow, and a husband who's going to be working some 12 hours a day.
Fridman will only do one act in the show this year but he will also go on with the plateful of multifaceted tasks he shouldered last year, and then some - driving one of the circus' trucks, setting up the deployment and parking of circus vehicles upon arrival onto a new lot, managing the doors crew, overseeing program sellers, plus, la cerise on the cake this year, he might also act as prop guy during the show (someone who takes care of all technical aspects of the acts) and help in taking down and setting up the props as well, thus basically having to work during the whole show every day plus the setting up and taking down and up times. Long, very long days.
Fridman: "It's still less than when I was at Carson and Barnes and the pay is better." The way I see it, it's like extolling the merits of slavery versus indentured labor. If I'm lucky I'll get to see him around three o'clock in the morning when he crashes into bed. Until now the agreement was he would be getting paid the same as last year, $ 500 a week before taxes (a shocking 30 percent in this country - for a salary that low it would only be about 10 percent in France, that high taxes socialist heaven), plus a fraction more, to be negotiated, for the prop business. Winning the lottery sounds really good.