Guest writer Liat Ginsberg is a mother and former journalist for the Israeli newspaper, Maariv. She has taught at the Film and Media Department at Hunter College.

Most of us know that watching a movie with an African american (black) crowd, or going to a African american church is a different experience. Now you can add to it going to a circus with African american audience and many African american performers. It’s a wild, fun and very interesting experience. Imagine sitting in huge African american church listening to great voices and dancers and add to it performers doing very daring twirling bicycles, disco dancing pachyderms, free-flying aerial, flipping canines, and extreme motorsports and much more.

UniverSoul Circus

UniverSoul Circus is a highly interactive combination of circus arts, theater, and music  including Pop, Classic R&B, Latin, Hip Hop, Jazz and Gospel. It’s a different circus for many reasons: it’s interactive, the audience is part of the act and people are encouraged to dance and sing on stage or between the isles.

In many circuses you will notice very talented stone faced acrobats who rarely interact with the audience. In the Universoul Circus, the acrobats look like they love what they are doing. They must go to work with a smile. They are  engaging and encourage the audience to have fun as much as they do.

Universoul Circus is for every age. It’s not easy to find an entertainment to take the kids to, that grown-ups will also enjoy. In our case, we enjoyed it as much as the kids.

The audience members in the Bronx were so awesome. We couldn’t stop laughing. At times. we wondered if they weren’t ringers. If you volunteer to go on stage, expect to be asked to dance and have rhythm.

In addition, you will witness Olate Dogs from Chile (winners of AMERICA’S GOT TALENT), Ethiopian Pole Act from Ethiopia, Aerial Duet from Colombia, Bicycle Tricks from China, Airborne Motorcycles from California, Caribbean Dance and Limbo from Trinidad and Tobago, Russian Bar from Cuba and dancing Elephants from the United States, a multicultural, multinational mix of talent.

My family was very impressed by the Airborne Motorcyclist. It will leave you in awe. The riders almost touched the ceiling with their motorbikes. I was wondering, they are so lucky their mothers were not in the crowd, they would have definitely fainted.

When I asked my six-year old daughter what was her favorite part, she replied, “I loved the puppies but did not like the elephants. I felt bad for them, they looked sad.” I told her that many countries have banned live animal in circuses.

My daughter also complained about the very long intermission, almost 45 minutes, which gave many kids the opportunity to ride a pony for 10 dollars. Not a bad thing for a child.

And, of course, there are photos with the clown for 10 dollars and you can also purchase light up toys .

Our family loved Universoul Circus, I recommend it as great family activity,  your kids will remember it for years to come. Here’s info if you want to get tickets:

UNIVERSOUL CIRCUS performs in five different venues:

THE BRONX

March 30 thru April 10, 2016

50 E. 150th St., Bronx, NY 10451 (Across from Bronx Terminal Market at 149th St. and Exterior St. Next to the bridge)

BROOKLYN

April 12-24, 2016

3159 Flatbush Ave., Brooklyn, NY 10451 (Floyd Bennett Field @ Aviator Sports. Just down from Kings Plaza Mall)

QUEENS

April 27-May 15, 2016

Roy Wilkins Park, Merrick Blvd. and Baisley Blvd., Jamaica, NY  11434

NEWARK

May 18-30, 2016

430 Broad Street, Newark, NJ  07102 (Across from Broad Street Train Station next to the Riverfront Bears Stadium)

Visit www.universoulcircus.com for more info, show times, and schedules.  Tickets are on sale now via Ticketmaster.com or 1-800-745-3000. Ticket prices range from $16 through $40.  Prices vary by venue and by day.

Disclosure: Liat received these tickets on a complimentary basis, but all opinions are her own.

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CIRQUE ZÍVA at the New Victory Theater, with artistic direction by Danny Chang and choreography by Angela Chang, is a superbly performed piece of physical theatre. If their purpose was to demonstrate the incredible capabilities of the human body, they achieved it without a doubt.

The Golden Dragon Acrobats are flexible and well balanced athletes, actors and artists who were trained in their craft from early childhood. There are acrobats spinning around within metal rings, strong women standing on each other, while keeping smiles on their faces, men leaping through hoops, and juggling acts. One of them, Ya Nan Hou, impressively tosses and turns a table on her legs while reclining.

Other acts include flag waving, group ropes, unicycles, nine people riding one bike and a man who creates a tower of six chairs and does a handstand on its top. It’s funny, I have seen so many photos of people riding a bike together in India – they do it in daily life! I’ve also seen a 57 year-old man who did a handstand on a tower of chairs without a wire on his back for safety, as opposed to ZÍVA acrobats.

After intermission, a female contortionist was hanging from strips of blue silk cloths. I didn’t understand why they had to combine her with two men performing a strength and balancing act. We had to choose which one to watch. Another contortionist, Ping Gao. impressed us with twisting trays of wine glasses around her body. She put the trays on her legs, hands and even her head. We thought that the glasses were not real or even glued, but at the end of her act she emptied some liquid out of the glasses.

Although most of the performers are from Asia, the music is not. The costumes are very colorful, which adds to the movement of acrobats and the beauty of the stage.

We came on a very rainy day, and it was our first visit to the New Victory. I like the idea of locker space downstairs to store coats during the show, as well as extra cushions for the kids seats. In addition, you can pre-order intermission snacks (at reasonable prices), thus avoiding a long line.

The only thing I would change is that I would have added an M.C. who would communicate with the kids and make them laugh. I understand that most the actors are not American, but it’s a family show. Kids deserve to be talked to.

A Show for Autistic Children

This performance has been specially adapted for individuals with autism or sensory sensitivity and everyone is welcome to enjoy the show in a relaxed atmosphere. In order to make the show more accessible to individuals on the autism spectrum and their families, these provisions were made:

• Sound in the production will be lowered and staff will warn of any upcoming loud noises during the show.
• Lights in the seating area will be dimmed rather than fully dark during the performance.
• A Relaxed Atmosphere allows patrons to talk and vocalize as they wish, as well as leave and re-enter the seating area as needed.
• An Activity Area will be available with a live video feed of the show, coloring sheets and fidget toys if patrons need to take a break from the seating area.
• A Calming Corner will be available with fidget toys and bean bag chairs if patrons need a quiet place to relax.
• Autism Specialists will be available throughout the performance to provide assistance as requested or needed.
• A Family Restroom (gender-neutral) will be designated.

CIRQUE ZÍVA is playing until January 4th. Tickets can be bought here.

About the author: Liat Ginsberg is a mother and a former Journalist for the Israeli newspaper Maariv. She taught at the Film and Media department at Hunter College.

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I have a remarkably happy marriage, and people ask me all the time how I got so lucky. (Not as often as they ask me about autism, vaccines and Jim Carrey, so let’s get something straight before we go any further: Not. Her.) I used to wonder if it had something to do with pheromones or having relatively low expectations, but after eleven years of wedded bliss I am pretty sure the key is some combination of kindness, respect and my ability to read a road map upside down divided by my husband’s skill at tuning out my nagging.

Okay, fine. We got lucky.

Busloads of studies have attempted to figure out why roughly every other marriage fails miserably. Turns out, the success stories share a few similarities beyond the obvious stuff like “they don’t have sex with other people”.  Here, then, are seven scientifically proven* steps to marital ecstasy.

Be thinner and better looking than your husband. I have no idea why this works to create nuptial delight but I’m guessing it’s because if you’re fat and ugly you probably never want to have sex, which makes him grumpy and mean because sex was the one and only reason he got married in the first place. (Well, that and pie. Think about it: Most guys will never bake a pie in their lifetimes and from what I’ve seen, they really like pie.)

Of course, I don’t know many women who are dying to have sex with fat, ugly men, so this one remains a bit of a mystery.

Make sure he does more chores than you do (well, duh) and try to talk less than he does. I have to admit, if you asked my husband the top three things I could do to make him happier, “shut the hell up for five lousy minutes” would probably be on the list. (But not at the tippy-top. Ahem.)

Don’t watch a lot of chick flicks. Seems that after sitting through Gnomio and Juliet (or any other rom-com) relationship dissatisfaction tends to skyrocket. Apparently this is because maybe it could happen to you but you realize that it hasn’t and it probably won’t and that fat bastard never sprinkled rose petals on your bed, dammit. At least you’re thinner and better looking than he is.

Don’t win a best-actress Oscar. I included this one because unlike getting hotter or having your jaw wired shut, it’s actually pretty painless and doable. Personally, I am going to make this a priority in my marriage.

Limit your booze consumption (both of you). No comment.

Become or urge your partner to become a farmer, nuclear engineer or optometrist. Evidently every career choice has its own unique divorce-risk profile, with these three being on the lowest end. Dancers and choreographers are pretty much screwed. You can’t make this stuff up.

Prefer having the car windows down. I haven’t technically seen a study on this, but do you not fight about this every single time you ride in a vehicle together? And doesn’t he get all pissed when you want them up and accuse you of being more concerned about your hair than his precious need for non-recirculated air? If anyone bothered to study this, I’m confident the results would back me up.

So there you have it. I do not suggest trying to master all seven steps at once. For instance, if you stop doing housework altogether (to try to tilt his portion of the ratio toward more), you’ll have a lot of extra time on your hands which you may want to spend drinking alcohol. Remember, there’s no rush here. Till death do us part is a really long time**.

*I may have bastardized the language a bit in some cases but the facts are mostly accurate.

**I stole that line from If It Was Easy They’d Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon: Living with and Loving the TV-Addicted, Sex-Obsessed, Not-So-Handy Man You Married, which I wrote (and please note that it says the blah-blah-blah man you married, not the one I married. My husband likes it when I point that out). You can find out more about me, my books and how I survived tanorexia on my website.

Please check out the trailer for Jenna’s new book, If It Was Easy They’d Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon: Living with and Loving the TV-Addicted, Sex-Obsessed, Not-So-Handy Man You Married:

– Don’t forget to google Zestra after you watch it… or better yet, check out the link on Jenna’s homepage.

Disclosure: This is a sponsored post by Role Mommy.

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“Mommy, does Santa Claus die?”
“Mommy, if you get stabbed by a light saber will you die?”
“Mommy, what happens to your eyes when you die?”

My 4-year old son has been lobbing these and other complex questions at me for about 6 months now.  It all began innocently enough, with the introduction of one of my favorite books from childhood: Babar.  Yes, Babar. Perhaps you will remember that Babar’s mother gets shot by a “wicked hunter” on page 3.  Did you remember that? I didn’t.  Well, that one incident opened up a line of questioning I wasn’t quite prepared to answer.

When our children are curious about things, and ask thoughtful questions, my husband and I always do our best to give them the respect of a real answer.  But how much is too much, I often wonder.  In our home we also feel, although we are not religious, that it is important to give our kids a sense of something larger than mommy and daddy, something that they can hold on to if they are confused or scared.  So, talking about death and dying with our children is complicated by my wanting to also share my beliefs concerning our souls and God. Just to make it more confusing, I am often concerned as to whether giving them too much information might, instead, make them worry about whether people they love might die.

In December, my 39-year-old husband had a heart attack.  I almost wrote “unexpected heart attack”, but when do you ever expect them?  He spent a week in the hospital, had a blood clot removed and then two stents inserted into his arteries.  Suddenly I realized how terribly unprepared I was for the unthinkable if it had actually happened.  Discussing death with my children in concept wasn’t so tough after all; talking about it when it really means something to you is a different story entirely.

“Mommy, is Daddy coming home?”
“Mommy, what is a blood clot?”
“Mommy, when you die, does your spirit go to heaven?”

Given the age of our children, I knew I had to give them information in terms they could understand and allow them to ask as many questions as they needed to.  I simply said Daddy was sick; he went to the hospital because he had a boo-boo on his heart.  When they called their father in the hospital to ask what kind of boo-boo his heart had, he gave them the simplest explanation of what a blood clot is.  His answer that it made the blood stop getting to daddy’s heart, like a plug in a drain, was immediately understood.

Even though I didn’t express the idea that Daddy could have died, and although I tried to keep things as normal as possible, our children knew something was different.  Our son, as is his general way, asked lots and lots of questions.  He seemed quieter, more thoughtful and spent lots of time telling me he loved me “really much”.  Our daughter became much more clingy.  Suddenly, she found everything in her room frightening.  The bedtime routine dragged on interminably as she tried to get someone to stay and watch her all night.  Even her bed was now “scary” and she decided she had to sleep, curled up like a cat, on the foot of her brother’s bed.

This unexpected reminder that nothing in life is guaranteed, changed a number of things in our house after Daddy came home.  My husband and I are making a greater effort to model a healthy lifestyle by eating more vegetarian meals and doing more activities with the kids that involve actually moving our bodies.  My initial response to this crisis was extreme anxiety and an uncharacteristic wish to draw my family in close in order to protect them.  But hovering, nervously, over everyone wasn’t a healthy way to live.  As time passed, I remembered the importance of allowing our children to experience their lives in a full and rich way, without interference from a mom worrying about death and dying.  We have no way of knowing how many todays we actually have; I don’t want us to waste any of them being fearful.

Gina Osher is the author of the popular blog, The Twin Coach, where she writes on varied parenting topics such as finding the meaning of life in Halloween Candy to advice for sibling rivalry to finding more joy in parenting.  Whether you have twins or singletons, if you’re trying to be the best parent you can be, you can relate!  You can also find Gina spending too much time on Facebook and Twitter.

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By Becky Beaupre Gillespie and Hollee Schwartz Temple

Authors, Good Enough Is the New Perfect: Finding Happiness and Success in Modern Motherhood

Creating and running a business has a way of inciting perfectionist tendencies. But it also offers a unique path to what we call the New Perfect.

We know this from our own ventures — and we saw it in the dozens of mompreneurs we interviewed for Good Enough Is the New Perfect: Finding Happiness and Success in Modern Motherhood (Harlequin Nonfiction, April 2011).

There are nearly 8 million women-owned enterprises in this country, accounting for 23 million jobs and packing a $3 trillion annual impact, according to 2009 data from the Center for Women’s Business Research. And it’s no wonder: entrepreneurship offers flexibility, control and, sometimes, the chance to escape jobs that never quite fit in the first place.

But it isn’t always easy, especially when the “Never Enoughs” in us send us shooting for the stars, only to discover that we haven’t equipped ourselves with enough support or let go of our perfectionist tendencies.

One of the women we feature launched her own business during the two years we spent interviewing her. Jen already had four kids and a full-time career as a doctor, but she also dreamed of inventing toys and running her own business. She’s a typical go-getter, so she went for it. But a year in, she found herself exhausted and overwhelmed. She’d taken on too much, and she wasn’t sure whether she’d sink or swim.

You’ll have to read the book to find out exactly how she managed to swim — she built her business into an inspiring success — but suffice it to say that attitude played a big role. She gave herself permission to do less by strategically cutting back on things that weren’t as important to her. She spent less time worrying and more time delegating. She adjusted her expectations, and focused her energy on the things that truly inspired her passion.

That’s the great lesson of the New Perfect, for entrepreneurs and all working moms. We must define success on our own terms. We need seek out and accept help; it’s a difficult road when we go it alone. We need to keep our true passions and priorities front and center. And we need to accept that we’ll make mistakes and experience setbacks along the way.

Many of the successful mompreneurs we interviewed shared this important quality: They were willing to risk failure. And they knew that “failure” didn’t have to equal catastrophe. They knew that each obstacle would simply require some kind of adjustment — and that the right tweaks would allow them to forge ahead, perhaps stronger than before. This characteristic gave them a head start on the path to the New Perfect.

After all, nothing kills a dream faster than being so afraid of messing up that we don’t even try.

Becky and Hollee’s new book, Good Enough Is the New Perfect: Finding Happiness and Success in Modern Motherhood, is available at http://amzn.to/newperfect . They blog about parenting and work/life balance at http://TheNewPerfect.com.

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