Big night last night. Lots of heart, and feelings, and tears, and laughter, and joy.

My old circus - Circus Contraption - disbanded back in 2009. Our last show - The Show To End All Shows - ran for two years, and during the last week of the last run we did a 3-camera video shoot of the whole show, with the intent to release a DVD.

And then Things Happened, and hard disks with the video files on them were put in the back of a closet, and everyone went their ways and built new careers for themselves. The video was largely forgotten about. A myth that Circus fans told each other, hoping it was true, but never really believing they'd ever see it.

Until last month.

When someone excavated the old drives, got the data off them, slapped together a (very) rough edit of the full show.

And last night, we rented out theater 1 at the Northwest Film Forum and showed the movie. Two shows. SRO.

Most of the artists were able to be there, and this was the FIRST TIME any of them had seen the whole show from the audience's perspective! You don't think about it while you are watching the people currently on stage, but the other performers are back stage changing costumes, or running lines and pulleys making things on stage happen, or are simply fixing their costume/makeup before their next moment on stage.

Maybe you are the juggler, and during someone else's act, when you hear the person on stage say, "Oh my! I wasn't expecting THAT!", you pull a rope. Then you hear the audience roar with laughter. Then you re-secure that rope, and go back to put on the hat you wear in the next scene. But you never see what the audience sees, or the result of your actions!

Well, the performers finally got to see the show the way all of us had always seen it.

And we all sang along with the tunes, and mourned the circus members who were killed a few years ago, and celebrated their memories with their happy on-stage antics, and ... it was a reunion.

And it was wonderful.

And I cried. Many times.

sigh.