Some shit has hacked my account and been putting stuff on my blog that was not from me. I do apologise. It's the same person who hacked my facebook account. So the moral of the story is... Don't use the same password for different accounts. Lesson learned. I won't in the the future! x

I haven't written a blog in ages. I apologise. But I started writing a book at the end of summer and it has absolutely absorbed me. I'm loving it! But I've now collected together a bunch of my other bits of creative writing, like poems, stories, thoughts, etc. So watch this space... I'm back. And to kick off, here are my new years resolutions for 2007. It was my 28th birthday on new years eve and I'm feeling happier, sexier, more powerful and more settled every day. Life is grand!

- Learn to drive and get a van.
- Get an agent and earn loads of money acting.
- Return to Georgia.
- Move to New York.
- Get together with the man of my dreams.
- To find out and write down when people's birthdays are and send them all cards.
- Take up Taxidermy and make new animals, like a squirrel with little hoofs.
- Learn to knit.
- Remain uber fit.
- Enjoy my Saturn Returns to the max.
- Be a space for 'Anything is Possible' and for being 'Magnificent' in 2007!

How does one become a Director of Fooling? It's impossible to answer this question, especially as, after a year in the job, I'm not sure if I have actually become one yet. On the surface it's an administration job; organising tours, sorting out publicity, that sort of thing. But one can't simply administrate the world of the Fool. If anything, the world of administration is at odds with the world of Fooling. A Fool is making nonsensical sense of this chaos we call life, where as administration is the organisation and linear progression of the black and white. However, everything that ever has been and ever will be exists in the world of the Fool, which resides in the realm of archetypes. Here you will even find the archetypal administrator, the administrator of all administrators- a long suffering organiser caught in the eternal trap of taking on responsibility to hide their vulnerability!

Bizarrely enough, the road to Director of Fooling all started with a near death experience as a child. After nearly drowning and hallucinating an old man in Tudor clothes coming to my rescue, a few years later an older guy I knew who was a pagan, came up and told me about shamanism and how shamans find ways to make contact with the spirit world by inducing near death experiences. Seen as I had nearly died and may have made contact with a spirit, he believed that I had found the shamanic path. As a thirteen-year-old Nirvana fan, with henna in my hair and tie-dyed purple velvet clothes, it was the coolest thing anyone had ever said to me!

Many years on and I found myself working as a stand-up comedian (still having the nightmares now) and spent a couple of years doing the circuits. Then someone gave me a book that changed my life. It was one of those 'For Beginners' books, entitled 'The History of Clowns for beginners' (amusingly, I leant this book to a shaman sometime later and after three years he still hasn't returned it). The history began with shamans and ended with Charlie Chaplin, I was instantly enthralled. I kept thinking to myself "This is it! This is me, it's what I'm all about!" until I came to the point where it said 'Stand-up comedians are not the same as clowns, as there is a huge difference between telling a joke and being a joke'. So that was it. I threw in the towel on stand-up comedy and became a joke.

I had found the perfect marriage between humour and the arts. In this space everything is subverted and subversive. One can question and play around with perceptions of reality, opening up audiences to the possibilities of the moment, in a way that all other art forms can only subtlety allude to. This provoking and terrifying world has been with us since the dawn of existential thought and it will continue existing whilst we are still struggling with the balance between light and dark, life and death, man and woman or good and evil. Through humour, the shamanic fool trips the light fantastic between binary oppositions, turning all rules and structures of conduct on its head. From a post-modern point of view, culture is an exciting state of flux, where all the rules are being called into question. By embracing the fool or the clown with us, we are embracing our capacity to accept change and celebrate creation. The fool never takes anything for granted. Nothing is safe or sacred. With the question mark as our crucifix, all is open to renewed observation and witty remark.

After training with Angela De Castro, performing with the HaHa Harmonics Clown Choir at the Mime Festival 2004, and helping Jon Jordon in the early stages of forming the CIRCA Clown Army, I stumbled across Jonathan Kay and his unique technique of Fooling. It is different to clowning in that the relationship to the audience with clowning is based on a triangle; something happens, you look at the audience and think, then you react. With Fooling everything comes from the audience. The stories, tangents, characters and mood are all fed to you from the audience, filtered through you as an artist and fellow audience member and performed back to the audience in a twisted and abstract form. Never have I found anything that is so revealing, challenging or that hits the nail on the head so precisely. It is magical. In the time I have been working with Jonathan Kay I have seen miracles unfold in front of my eyes, social taboos turned on their heads and everything I stand for called into question, and this happens at every performance! You could go to a hundred shows and receive thousands of revelations. The world of the Fool is infinite because the world of every audience member is infinite, they just don't realise it. Who does not contain within them worlds unimagined?

So here I am, Director of Fooling for the world famous Fool, Jonathan Kay. It's a tough job, it's an indefinable job and its not a very well paid job, but it is certainly the most inspiring place I've ever been!

Currently, Jonathan Kay runs quarterly five-day workshops in his fooling technique at BAC. His workshops are as revelatory as his shows and he introduces you to the support structure that he has developed over the last thirty-five years, which holds your hand as you climb the ladder up to and off of the diving board into the world of the fool. Once you're in that world, however, neither Jonathan nor yourself knows what will happen! We are currently working with the Arts Council, BAC, Winchester Hat Fair and the Nightingale Theatre to develop a Nomadic Academy of Fools.

Jolie Pierce
Director of Fooling

Check out www.jonathankay.co.uk for information on Jonathan's workshops and shows and I also recommend reading Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates by Tom Robbins if your interested in these ideas.

I sat and listened yesterday as a vivacious young lady whom I adore, let rip into an article about a 62 year old woman who had just conceived through IVF treatment. "Well done!" she said "And by the time its five, you'll be dead".

The whole question of when and how to start a family has gone completely pete tong during our life time. As with everything that emerges with the tides of time, we cant do anything to stop it. Its the state of play and the more you try to resist it, the more it will grind you down. It is worth, though, looking at what options you are being presented with in the current state of things and to have a lively interest in how and why these have come about?

Children in the next generation are going to have to deal with some wierd situations. They might have old or dead parents, same sex parents, parents who engineered their sex, looks and IQ. We have no way of knowing what this experience will be like for these children, anymore than we can know what it is like growing up in a world war, as aristocracy or in a workhouse. But one thing we do know is that we will always blame our parents, at varying degrees, for our lot in life and that on the whole we will survive and endure until the resources keeping us alive have completely run out.

As a nature lover, I think its scary that we are breeding, what is inherently, a weak race, through IVF treatment and caesareans. I find any attempt of humans to manipulate the course of breeding terrifying and deeply unromantic. I no more want to fuck around with test tubes than I do an Arian Nazi. I also think that if I knew my parents had engineered my sex, good looks and genius IQ, that Id be a transgender, tattooed, drug addict in no time. What I dont understand is why people dont adopt? What is this obsession with passing on genes? Why does a woman feels she has to squeeze a bowling ball down a golf hole to prove shes a mother?

The world is vastly over populated. We are breeding like a virus and its making the world sick. And increasingly its the wrong people who are breeding. The intelligent and driven women didnt get pregnant at school. They knew they had to get as far away from their narrow-minded provincial towns as possible. Then they began to pursue their dreams and they knew that they couldnt provide the time or money for a child right now. Then they realised that they didnt trust men, that they were fed up of being fucked around and werent going to go out with anyone unless they were brilliant. So we have a society where the sparky, smart women are the ones who have had 2.4 abortions, whilst the rest of the population are shooting out brats who intimidate you on the bus.

Personally, Ive decided to adopt. I might give birth to one child to see what its like, but my 'family' will be made up of children whom I have given my love to and whom I've supported up the steep steps onto and the courage to leap off of the diving board into life. And I plan to do this on my own. Any men in my life supporting the children will be there because they personally get on with the children and want to be part of their lives. My children are welcome to choose their own father figures. My brother's father figure was never our father, even when my parents were together, it was always our Granddad. Children choose the people they love and respect as much as adults do and none of us tend to love and respect someone who has spunked in our mother. They need to do a little more than just that!

I dont think that our love lives and family lives are intertwined any longer. And the intelligent, driven women who are creeping past and into thirty are going to have to make some powerful choices about how they go about starting a family. Make do with a man who will have her, get herself pregnant by 'accident' and suffer the consequences or choose to start a family off of their own accord? Or, I guess, you can always keep waiting for Mr Right, and hope that he is up for breeding when you finally meet him!

If I had a pound for every woman Ive heard of late saying that they werent interested in making do with a man, Id be a rich woman. Whilst in the sauna at the public baths the other day, I lay there listening to a group of middle aged women discussing whether or not they felt that they needed a man in their lives. They repeated the same comment Ive heard countless times of late; Im happy with my life the way it is, I dont need to be in a relationship. A man will just disrupt everything.

Ive heard lots of women, my Mum included, discussing how the men they meet seem lovely, but he will always think that his life is far more important than anything she is doing. Its great having men in their lives, but wont live with someone again and play second fiddle to their needs.

Many of my girlfriends are single and will not go out with someone just for the sake of it. Theyd prefer to be single and uncompromised. Some of them are therefore fairly celibate, whilst others are having loads of sex.

Its a funny old situation that can seem very negative but in some ways its a positive. Increasingly, women are refusing to make do with set ups that compromise too many of their principles or passions, and this in turn means they are being less clingy and significant about L-O-V-E. There is much more room for equal appreciation/self reliant relationships, rather than relationships that function as a crutch and respite from oneself.

But it leaves a bit of a question mark over the idea of children and having a family. The way that families have been structured has been changed beyond all recognition over the last few generations and it looks set to become even more weird and wonderful in the future

Tis better to be a whore than a maid.
This world in all its splendour and beauty
Has a touch of the cruelty.
And I have found in my time,
Naivety is by far the greatest crime.
Only through experience and filling the well,
Can we mortals cease fearing the gateways of hell.
You gain nothing from morality...
Except, perhaps, in cases of legality.
Whoring is not as hard as you may think,
And the perk is get a lot of free drink!
A simple sales pitch is all you need.
Listen this one has served me well for many a year;

Good day to thee master!
Is thou looking for a bit of fun?
Howd you like to buy a gale a pale of ale?
Then mayhap a quick bum-dance master?
Thou could give us a hard ride wiv yer cream-stick!
I only cost one groat and they do say I last for hours,
Once I lasted so long, the master could not sit down for a week.
Master, may I sit on your lap and see what comes up?

Do not waste your skills of poetry on a valentine
For they care not.
Keep them for your mothers day card
When your brownie points will notch up!

Sometimes the love radar switches on and you have the urge to be really vulnerable and open with someone. To be fascinated by someone and them be fascinated by you. You do have moments of loneliness when youre single. And you find yourself looking around at possible candidates for a love affair. During these times one has to remind oneself that, if theyre hadnt been thunderbolts in the first place, that forcing an affair just because your feeling lonely isnt going to sort your life out. But these moments of loneliness are tough. When you think of the number of people you meet everyday and how none of them have been the person you are looking for. You can start to wonder if they actually do exist. But if your not meeting the right candidates then for one reason or another youre not creating them in your life. Youve probably got a few more lessons to learn from being single. The right person will come at the right time. Whatever you do, dont make do.

Origin of Love
(Hedwig and the Angry Inch)

When the earth was still flat
And the clouds made of fire
And mountains stretched up to the sky
Sometimes higher
Folks roamed the earth
Like big rolling kegs
They had two sets of arms
They had two sets of legs
They had two faces peering
Out of one giant head
So they could watch all around them
As they talked while they read
And they never knew nothing of love
It was before...
The origin of love

And there were three sexes then
One that looked like two men
Glued up back to back
Called the children of the sun
And similar in shape and girth
Were the children of the earth
They looked like
Two girls rolled up in one
And the children of the moon
Was like a fork shoved on a spoon
They were part sun, part earth
Part daughter, part son

The origin of love

Now the gods grew quite scared
Of our strength and defiance
And Thor said,
"I'm gonna kill them all with my hammer,
Like I killed the giants"
But Zeus said, "No-
You better let me
Use my lightning like scissors
Like I cut the legs off the whales
Dinosaurs into lizards"
Then he grabbed up some bolts
He let out a laugh
Said, "I'll split them right down the middle
Gonna cut them right up in half"
And then storm clouds gathered above
Into great balls of fire

And then fire shot down
From the sky in bolts
Like shining blades of a knife
And it ripped right through the flesh
Of the children of the sun and the moon and the earth
And some Indian god
Sewed them up into a hole
Pulled it round to our belly
To remind us of the price we pay
And Osiris and the gods of the Nile
Gathered up a big storm
To blow a hurricane
To scatter us away
In a flood of wind and rain
A sea of tidal waves
To wash us all away
And if we don't behave
They'll cut us down again
And we'll be hopping 'round on one foot
And looking through one eye

Last time I saw you
We had just split in two
You were looking at me
I was looking at you
You had a way so familiar
But I could not recognize
'Cause you had blood on your face
I had blood in my eyes
But I could swear by your expression
That the pain down in your soul
Was the same as the one down in mine
That's the pain
That cuts a straight line down through the heart
We call it love
We wrapped our arms around each other
Tried to shove ourselves back together
We were making love
Making love
It was a cold, dark evening
Such a long time ago
When by the mighty hand of Jove
It was the sad story how we became
Lonely two-legged creatures
It's the story of the origin of love
That's the origin of love

In this fair land tis often the way,
that maids are expected to be both the guardian and gatekeeper of their fine sex,
Whilst masters have the freedom to rove about the countryside baying like wolves,
In search of their next feast.
This can create the illusion that we are under attack.
That we are hunted and in danger,
And our delicate silent orchid;
Not yet wise in the ways of men,
May grow fearful and shut tight like a clam.
It is important that a maid, to keep her charms both well oiled and brave,
Take it upon herself to open her clam up with great regularity.
To please its wanton desires and to feed its endless appetite.
Unlike a stomach, that grows in want through abstention,
The clam grows hungry through masturbation.
A mistress who can please herself,
Worries not about being left on the shelf.
And the waggle dance ceases to be the focus,
When the real pleasure comes when she touches her crocus!

Life is meaningless - but that isn't a bad thing or a good thing. It just is. Its normal to think that this means we should all give up and throw the towel in, but actually its the very opposite.

If life is meaningless then everything we have filled it up with is also meaningless.

Any meaning we think that our lives have we have made up. Each and every one of us has created the world we live in and the various meanings we have attached to them.

It isn't because there is a God, or because we are good or bad people or because of fate. Its because we are meaning making machines. We can't help ourselves. It's how our brains work. We can't control it.

But we can control what meanings we chose to make up for our lives. So if you really take on that life is meaningless, then it provides you with a blank slate, a tabula rasa, onto which you can chose to put whatever you want.

Maybe you chose to be religious. But its your choice, which is what God said he wanted you to have anyway. 'You are unique with spirit be, you must chose to follow me'. It may not be someone else's choice, however and thats their perrogative. And seen as your creating what that means to you anyway, if they're bothering you its because your creating someone in your life who is bothering you. You could always create something else.