A childhood memory vindicated!
When you're a wee tot, your memory is often faulty and unreliable. I remember all sorts of business from my very early childhood which I know must have been either dreams or childhood fancies which don't accurately reflect any actual event. This having been said, there is one memory which I have retained for some twenty-five years or so which I have repeatedly wondered about, just because it was so specifically bizarre that it seemed unlikely my five-year-old mind would have had the ability to conjure such images.
Two days ago, I finally found proof that what I was recalling did indeed take place, and was every bit as bizarre as I remember it having been:
This is Mummenschanz. Apparently it's a group of surrealist performace artists who were pretty big in the 1970s. My recollection had me at a live performance by these oddities by my mother and father - one of my very, very few memories of anything I did with both of my parents as a child - and just viewing this performance as the single most exciting and fascinating thing I had ever seen in all of my four or five years of life. It's things like this make me wish my parents had stayed together beyond my sixth year of life; if they were taking me to see awesome stuff like this as a wee kid (and assuredly my mother did not, after my dad was gone), then I can't help but think I would have had a far more pleasant and interesting childhood entertainment life if they'd remained together.
(though there were excellent and compelling reasons for them to split up which had nothing to do with tastes in entertainment and which I don't begrudge my mother at all, as far as that goes)
Anyways, I felt like I ought to share this joy with you, the readers, since it seems to stand to reason to me that if I have gone 25 or 26 years without any exposure to them, many of you will have never seen anything of them at all.
Click to viewIn one specific regard, it seems my memory did fail me, though: I had falsely believed the act to have involved black lights, which I can't now find evidence that it did. I believe that - like the image up top there - they were simply wearing black leotards (as they apparently tended to) and performed against a black backdrop with brightly-coloured act-specific costume pieces which were highlighted with regular lights.
(there is more of their material on Youtube here: http://ca.youtube.com/results?search_query=Mummenschanz+&search_type=&aq=-1&oq= , and their personal webpage is to be found here: http://www.mummenschanz.com/ )