What ho! Explorers.....
If you go outside.....
....and look up into the sky.......
....you may just be able to see......
....high above you.....
....the diminutive frame.....
....of a clown.
Yes....a clown......
....whirling silently in space........
Not a cartoon clown....
....but a real clown...
...hovering high above us all.
And the name of this Clown....
...is Guy Laliberte.
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This Clown is very well known in the entertainment world....
....being the founder of 'Cirque du Soleil'......
..... which he still has a 95% stake in.
'Cirque du Soleil' is a circus arts and theatre performance company that turned 25 this year.
The Cirque kicked off its 1988 debut in New York with a benefit for homeless people.
Laliberte, who is the father of five children and is engaged to be married to his current fiancee, was born in Quebec City and started out as a teenage fire-eater..........
.....and he's also been a stilt walker, a musician and a magician.
But it was the magic he worked with a rag-tag bunch of street performers from the Quebec hamlet of Baie-St-Paul to create the Cirque du soleil in 1984 that got him noticed in a really big way.
The Cirque shunned the traditional use of animals and instead embraced acrobats, high-tech, music and dance.........
It wowed audiences and its mind-bending performances have even become a sort of shorthand for screenwriters in movies and TV when they want to suggest a character has seen a glitzy, hot-ticket show.
"We're trying to reinvent the circus and make people laugh at the same time," says Laliberte......
"I'm doing what every kid dreams about: running away and joining the circus. The problem is that it's my circus - and administering it..... is not quite the same as performing......
....There are days when I wish I could run away to Hawaii - like I once did when I was a teen - and just do my fire-eating act on the beach. Life was really so much simpler then."
"He's the kind of guy that is never happy with a normal life," says Daniel Lamarre, a longtime friend of Laliberte and the Cirque's president and CEO.
Lamarre suggests that attitude hasn't changed much.
"He doesn't like to do the day to day of the business," Lamarre says of the 50-year-old Laliberte. "That's why I'm doing it, because he wants to keep his focus on the creative content......
As much as Guy is an amazing businessman, the one place where he's above everyone else is creative content and international development.
Those two things still keep him stimulated."
Laliberte has wowed masses of people, including politicians and pop stars with his show.
Elton John was once so impressed with a Cirque show that he flew from Hawaii to San Francisco with 10 friends in tow to see the troupe perform again.
The Cirque became a 'for-profit' group in 1985.
Laliberté eventually bought out his majority partner in 2000......
....And he hit the jackpot in 1991 when Steve Wynn brought Cirque to Las Vegas.
Today the business makes $550 million (revenues) and has four permanent shows in Sin City, including the $165 million "Ka," which opened in February 2005 at MGM Grand.
It produces a total of ten shows, with another three on the way.
Laliberte has been driven all his life by two things - creating unique artistic content and helping change the world....
..... even in little ways such as helping villages in Honduras and Nicaragua get clean water.
"It's probably one of the best kept secrets," Lamarre said of the Cirque's philanthropy.......
...."That one per cent of the organization's box-office take goes to social causes".
"As you can imagine, one per cent of our box office represents millions of dollars," Lamarre said.......
.... "But Guy came to me two years ago and said...... that's not enough."
That conversation led to the creation of the
'One Drop Foundation' which also raises awareness of the threat to global water supplies.
And Guy doesn't blink in the face of risk, whether it's negotiating with Ringo Starr and Yoko Ono for a Beatles-themed Cirque show......
..... or climbing into a space-bound rocket.
Laliberte and his two fellow astronauts were cheered by supporters wearing red clown noses during pre-launch preparations at Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan yesterday.
"He is an amazing entrepreneur and he's the one who will always provoke people to go to their limits. I think this trip he's doing is a good illustration of that. Not only is he pushing himself to his limits but he's also pushing his team to do what they're doing right now, which is to try the crazy idea of having a show coming from the space station."
While even Lamarre describes Laliberte's space mission as "surreal," the CEO says the $35-million trip isn't just a billionaire's whim or a new way to torque a Cirque show. Lamarre says it illustrates another side to the high-stakes recreational poker player.
In 2007 Laliberte finished 4th in the World Poker Tour - Season 5 - event at Bellagio in Las Vegas and won $606,220.
Not that he needed the money.......Forbes magazine estimates Laliberte has a net worth of $2.5 billion.........
.....He was also recognized by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
But not everyone sees the shaven-headed Laliberte in such a flattering light......
He recently got into a legal battle over an unauthorized 'tell-all' book that alleged a wild partying lifestyle and ample supplies of drugs at the Cirque, something Laliberte has denied.
He is certainly known for throwing some amazingly wild parties over the years............
....... rubbing shoulders with a galaxy of stars, including actor Robert De Niro and director Francis Ford Coppola, and catering to their 'every need'.
Wallop!.....I can't wait to meet him!
If YOU could 'escape from it all'....where would you go....and why?
Tallyho!
Lord Noel & Lady Jacqueline
The Original design for a 
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