Barbette's Skeleton [X]: Rewind (Patreon)

My dear, strange, and wonderful patrons:

To begin at the beginning, we must travel in time all the way back to a year of antiquity: 2018. 

5G technology was an ominous, conspiracy-theory-inducing blip on the horizon. The #MeToo movement was spiking. NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe, its first mission to the sun and its outermost atmosphere to take some sizzling photos of the corona.

Back on earth, I was limping along through a career in stunts still (quite literally; this was around six months after I'd had a stem cell [auto]transplant to repair a big fat hole in my hamstring tendon where it attaches the muscle to your pelvis) (you know the bony part of your butt that hurts when you've sat on a hard bench for too long? yeah. that part). I'd had some fat taken out of my body, spun out in a centrifuge to isolate all the juicy stem cells, and shoved back into my body with an oversized (very scary looking) canula to try to stimulate healing. Then I had to let it heal. Do a lot of physio. That whole thing. 

In the fall of 2018, I met up with my friend Troy James for a bit he was shooting for a segment on Ripley's Believe It Or Not. 

Troy and I had met working on The Strain, a fun vampire-y Guillermo del Toro TV show where we both regularly got buried in prosthetics and then scampered around in creepy contortion shapes to add to the 'horror' element of the show. 

(I don't have any photos of me and Troy in costume together from this era, but I do have this:)

(Cute!) 

Troy had been plucked from his life as an HR manager for the Peel district police department after a video of him doing one of his 'my body has no bones' contortion tricks in the office went viral. He got picked up by America's Got Talent, went viral there too, and was catapulted into a completely unexpected film and television career.

The production team of Ripley's wanted Troy to call up another bendy friend for B-roll, so I headed down to Queen Street West on a chilly October afternoon and we  ran around upside down in bridge, to the too-cool disgruntlement of the other Torontonians. 

Between set-ups, Troy asked me if I'd be interested in doing a festival in France with him. A producer had reached out to him and asked if he'd do a solo act, but at that point in Troy's career he'd never done more than 2-minute talent-show live acts. He wasn't confident about pulling together a 5-minute number. 

"They'll fly us over there and everything," he said.

Troy and I had whiled away many a frozen night in a green room tent on The Strain discussing how we could make a creature-y contortion duo together one day. This seemed like as good a reason as any to explore that idea.

"If this producer will go for a duo instead of a solo, yeah, absolutely!" I replied. 

"You cool if I have my agents handle whatever paperwork there is for this?"

"Ooh, look at you, all fancy with an agent!" I'd teased back. "Yeah, of course. That's great. Just let me know when we're flying out," I laughed. 

"It'll be end of January next year," he said. 

"Alright." I chewed on my lip for a moment, running through my calendar in my head. "I'll be in Montréal from next week until mid-November, I got a grant."

"Ooh, right! Congratulations!"

"Thanks. What about you? Whats coming up?"

"I'm on a shoot out of the country until ... first week of December, I think."

"Okay so we'll start our creation when you're back from your movie."

"Yeah. Maybe we should bring in Roberto to help us with the choreography?"

The Strain had had a 'movement coordinator' who was in charge of making sure that all the strigoi (vampires) kept moving in the highly specific way that had been designed for the show. (When you were onboarded onto The Strain, you got to do a couple days of 'vamp camp'; hours spent on all fours on the floor, scampering about with your knees as turned out as possible, amongst other butt-cramping muscular engagements; felt terrible, looked awesome). 

That movement coordinator was a former primo ballerino named Roberto Campanella – a long-legged, effortlessly graceful, chain-smoking, espresso-sipping Roman man that Troy and I had struck up a friendship with on set. 

"Oh my god, if Roberto joins us it'll be so good," I said, eyes wide. "And that's ... what? Six weeks or so to make something creepy and creaturey and cool?"

"Yeah, that should work! That's enough time, right?"

It was not, in fact, 'enough time', dear patrons. 

As we wrapped up the Ripley's Believe It Or Not day, I turned to Troy a final time. "What's the name of the festival, by the way?" My mum would want to know. 

"Oh, hmm...let me just check my messages again," Troy mumbled. "It was something about 'tomorrow', hold on..."

I froze. My eyes went round as saucers and my head felt curiously light. 

There's no way, I thought to myself.  

"Okay, yup, found it!" Troy chirped. "The World Festival of the Circus of Tomorrow."

"Troy," I said slowly. "Just to be sure ... does that message say ... the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain?"

"Oh, yeah! 'Demain'!"

"Oh ... shit."

"What?!"

"Well – it's just that–"

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Your next instalment in this story continues on Saturday December 17th (7:00pm EST). Until then, stay strange and wonderful – 

XO Ess