@tonykobine1180

2 months ago

Beata and I were married from 1989 to 1994. I met her when I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1986 and attended classes at Bikram’s Yoga College of India where Beata was teaching.
As mentioned in this posting, Beata hoped to audition for the Cirque du Soleil. The reason why she wanted to work for them gives some insight into how she lived her life.
Early in our relationship, the Cirque came to San Francisco and she took me there to see a performer who built an elaborate and fragile pyramid out of chairs and wooden bricks. She pointed out the peak moment when the pyramid was it its highest, most fragile and most dangerous and when the artist was “in the zone” at that point. She reckoned his whole existence was tuned to creating and recreating such moments and she wanted to live like that too.
It was a long journey from that day to the time when the clip you posted was made and that journey took an important detour through France. Beta was a Francophile. I can’t remember what triggered it but she was crazy about the country and its culture and that’s why she changed her surname. (She was born Beata Tarr in Hungary in June 1953 so she would have been 61 when she died.) Shortly after we were married, we moved to Nice, France and Beata started to think of a way she could develop her skills in gymnastics and yoga into an art form. The costume you see in your clip was bought from a shop in Nice selling fancy dress to people going to revel at the annual Carnival of Venice.
Restaurants in Nice—and all the other popular vacation resorts in the South of France—have a tradition of allowing roving entertainers to perform for diners eating outside, seated in open-air terraces. So Beata started performing the routine you see in the clip there. I carried the black chair and a cassette player, she performed the routine and collected money. It was hugely successful. We earned enough money to survive the summer and this gave Beata the confidence to apply to join the Cirque. She lived in France for some time after we separated then returned to San Francisco and opened her own yoga studio there.

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