Send Out The Clowns
What made two circus-obsessed film actors escape to Arcata?
(Jan. 3, 2008) The large, black, beaked creature that carefully made its way among the risers of the Arcata Playhouse was kind of scary. But young Alexandra was not afraid. She turned in her front row seat and peered at him as he approached. She had a secret. She had met the man who now wore stilts and a mask before the Circus Remedy show began. He’d asked her to become part of his performance. She had a part to play — nothing too complicated — and she knew, now was the time.
The performer, juggler and stilt walker Patrick McGuire, had told her he would pick her out from the crowd and escort her to the stage, which he did, navigating on four stilts that made him tower above her. There she found Chrisse Harnos — formerly a Hollywood actor, now an Arcata nonprofit director — who served as the show’s emcee.
As Alexandra picked up a bright red ball that was sitting on a silver pedestal on stage, Harnos took the pedestal off-stage and left the little girl to wait clutching the ball until the juggler emerged from backstage dressed in a three-piece suit and a gray bowler, and, as per instructions, she handed him the ball.
He proceeded to juggle the ball along with several others like it. Before the show was over, he’d also juggled his bowler hat, an umbrella, a briefcase and the usual collection of balls and clubs.
McGuire, a circus pro who honed his skills working for years with Cirque du Soleil, was in Arcata on behalf of the organization that Harnos runs with her partner, Anthony Lucero, also a former Hollywood actor. It’s called Circus Remedy. Don’t be surprised if you haven’t heard of it. McGuire’s show at the Playhouse and another like it the day before at Sunny Brae Middle School were the first two events the group has done locally, and neither one was open to the general public.
Hardly anyone else has heard of Circus Remedy either, apart from a small circle of performers the group supports and the children they have entertained, here and there. But for Harnos and Lucero, the nonprofit has become a personal mission, a healing force, an potent source of meaning in a cold and crippled world.
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