The circus on the National Mall

Good morning, DMV! It’s Tuesday, Sept. 8.

For decades in my work as a journalist, I’ve taken photographs and video only as needed. I worked alongside the best in the business at the Associated Press and the Washington Post, and I also married a photographer, so I usually leaned on others for amazing visuals to accompany my words. Of course, if I went on assignment and a photographer couldn’t join, I did the job.

Then I became an independent newsletter writer. Now I have to take photos and videos. And this weekend, when I went to check out the Circus Arts Conservatory’s free performances at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, my daughter asked me to take videos for the parts of the show she missed. So for all of you and for her, I did my job.

Only I didn’t.

At home over breakfast yesterday, I handed my daughter my phone to check out my footage of the excellent shows she had missed. As she scrolled, she shook her head and said in an exasperated tone, “Oh, mama.” She told me I had hit record at the wrong time for five videos. That is, I thought I had taken video of each performance, but I only hit record after each show was finished.

So instead, I got a shot of my chin, taken from my lap. One video was 45 seconds of my foot. And another was a one-minute close-up of the skin on my knee.

But I did capture some pics and footage. The shows by students and professionals from the Circus Arts Conservatory — a nonprofit performing arts educational organization in Sarasota, Florida — were great.

It amazes me that these performers spend so many hours honing very unusual talents … such as the guy who could speed juggle with multiple ping pong balls (catching them in his mouth and blowing them back up into the air) and with straw hats.

There were students from the conservatory’s Sailor Circus Academy doing a five-people-on-a-bicycle routine.

And hammy musicians decked out in the best costumes ever.

Every time I go to performances like these, I am the person in the audience with the cheek-to-cheek smile of astonishment, my mouth agape, my hand at the ready to capture my cries of awe.

Dear readers: I consider my Daily Dose a community gratitude journal. It’s free, and I work on it solo, spending hours each day mining for story ideas, interviewing and exploring. Please consider supporting my work with a monthly or yearly donation to help make this project sustainable. Do you know anyone who would enjoy reading me? Forward this to them to help me grow. For newcomers: To subscribe, click here. And to those who already support me: I appreciate you.

Dan Woolley, 71, of Herndon, Virginia, sent me this pic he took in late August of a spider web at sunset near Dulles International Airport.

“I was wrapping up a sunset shoot close to IAD and was heading back to the car. When I looked over my shoulder, to make sure I wouldn't get hit by a passing car as I crossed the road, I saw what looked like a glowing orb suspended in the trees,” he wrote to me in an email.

“The unusual web was aligned with a few final rays of the rapidly disappearing sun. Unsure what I was seeing, I put the 200mm macro lens back on the camera and got as close as I could, crawling through the brambles. I clicked off a couple of frames, but then the sun disappeared and the web faded into the night and the darkness of the forest.

“I have no idea what kind of spider(s) created the web, but it was really cool how the sun sent its final rays into just that one spot — the scene only lasted maybe 3 minutes.”

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