Performer Kids: Growing Up Backstage
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)
Written November 2006

I recently interviewed my 22 year old son about his childhood growing up with the circus, in essence. I wondered how growing up with DIY entertainment, around legendary musicians, talented circus acts, original art and organic community, in natural settings, affected him. My son grew up in a magical world of fairs, complete with fire eaters, sword swallowers, stilt walkers, clowns, magicians, campfires with Klezmer music, forest paths with booths lit up all night long with candles and lanterns...my son saw little worlds in the woods come to life and disappear every summer. He knew the back paths to the secret doors to get backstage, he grew up with our performer family rituals, and this lifestyle, where thousands of us traveled and performed together at fairs for decades, was an interesting backdrop for a childhood, I would think. Back in 1986, I was interviewed as a local performer for Seattle’s legendary newspaper, The Rocket. I had my 2 year old son on my back during the interview, and the story said something about my son getting “one heck of an upbringing.” My son is not the only child raised in this extraordinary environment. Many of you, for example, will remember Larry Pisano’s son in his early years, from the early Pickle Family Circus days, in full clown regalia with his dad in all the promo shots. This is an interview with my own son, about his growing up in our Northwest performer family.

I asked my son, Gibralter, what effects growing up in our performer family had on him. He said he has a friend who is very similar to him, except his friend was raised in the middle class suburbs of Eugene, Or. His friend only had access to mainstream art and media, and my son said he became aware of his being different than other kids when he realized that he had grown up seeing our friends and family performing exceptional comedy and excellent, original, live music, in venues that were not mainstream. He began to realize there was a different, more avant-garde tone to the performance he was used to, than the mass media entertainment his friends knew. He said he realized that he had access to a lot of positive performance/entertainment experiences that his middle class friends simply did not have access to.

He said one of the things that stuck with him growing up backstage was seeing performers right next to you in real life, instead of only seeing them up higher than you, onstage. He said things like our family campfires full of performers, where unbelievably talented performers did shows on the ground level, on the level you are on, made an impression on him. He also said it made a mark on him to see performers in between performances. One of the things that he said he got out of growing up backstage was seeing performers getting ready to perform, not just seeing them on stage and he said that gave him a more whole picture of what performing entails. He said growing up backstage with performer family gives you a viewpoint that is not one of a typical audience member. He said he is more critical of acts than some of his non-performer family friends, as he knows what goes into shows and has a higher threshold of what impresses him, due to our family’s performances. He said that our friends provide a high bar to meet, and he does not appreciate things below the professionalism level of our family’s tastes. For instance, he said he found Reverend Chumleigh and the Flying Karamazov Brothers to be so professional, that he does not appreciate sloppy, poorly written vaudeville, after seeing how intelligent and clever that genre can be from their examples.

My son said he sometimes feels that since he has been exposed to something so good, and so much of it, that it is hard to later settle for mass-produced “crap.” He said he also feels that our performer family “grooms” their children towards artistic endeavors. He said he feels like growing up in our family gave him an apprentice-like exposure to the performing arts. He said many people look at artists as “other people over there” but in our family everyone is an artist of some kind, so he feels like it is a culture of art and music that our family lives within. He said his friend who grew up in the middle class suburbs saw artists only on TV, primarily, but the kids of our family saw the process of creating art, not just the product, and he said he thinks that really demystified the whole thing for him and other kids in our family.

He said that “demystification” of performance was important. He said seeing how the performances/music/art was FORMED was important. He said it was important to see all the work involved. He said it is important to see what goes on backstage to fully understand and appreciate the whole picture of any performance. He said by having the stage demystified via familiarity, really, it helped make the stage seem less overwhelming and less intimidating, as well. He said the difference between *on stage* and *off stage* looked less dramatic to him since he saw the performers go from their normal person, to becoming the persona of a performer backstage, to performing, to going back to a normal person offstage, and it taught him that it was really a process, that went logically from A to B to C, where many who only see a performer on stage, see the C step only.

My son said he is thankful that he was raised amidst such a rich performing culture and he is glad that he got to see so much of the inside world of performing as a child. People often wonder what the kids of performers end up thinking in the end. Well, my son was with me almost 24/7 his whole childhood, and he went to all my gigs, all my shows with me. He lived backstage with me. He hung out with other performers’ kids. Now he is an adult. His childhood is over. There is no rewriting it now. But when he and I look back, we had some really good times, in the woods, with talented performers, for decades, and I am thankful to have shared that with my son.