I learned to juggle when I was 11 from a book called Juggling for the Complete Klutz. I have seen other books that teach juggling, such as The Complete Juggler and Carlos on Juggling, but in my opinion, Klutz is the best. The most important thing they emphasize (which most others fail to do) is the scoop motion in the toss, which allows the ball going UP to miss the ball coming DOWN. There. That was my little free plug for Klutz. I hope you liked it. :)

I find that juggling is a very good form of meditation, as well as good exercise. You enter into a sort of “zone” while juggling that is very hard to explain. I found that my other motor skills improved when I started juggling. For example, if I don’t think about it and just do it, I can throw things very accurately to, for example, peg someone in the head with a rolled up sock. Check out this cool article from ABC News: Can Juggling Improve Your Brain?

I enjoy traveling to regional juggling festivals in the US, and hope to go to one of the EJA festivals one day. In 2004, I attended the IJA festival in Buffalo, New York, where I met a guy named Dan. We’ve been dating for two and a half years now, and have gone to the IJA festivals the last two years together, in Davenport, Iowa (2005) and Portland, Oregon (2006). We’ve been together since 2004 and are engaged to be married on May 24, 2009. We’ve been to every IJA festival together since we met, as well as numerous regional festivals. We currently live together in the Cleveland, OH suburbs.

My juggling photo gallery has photos and video clips… I also have galleries for various juggling festivals that I’ve attended.

Here are a couple of short movie clips from my digital camera:

• passing clubs with Dan
  
• doing Mills Mess (an interesting 3-ball pattern)

I used to attend the Fairfax Jugglers meetings every Thursday evening in Springfield, VA. Now that I’m in Atlanta, I attend the Atlanta Jugglers Association when I can. Since moving to Cleveland in 2007, I no longer attend regular juggling meetings, unfortunately. Hopefully the next city we move to (for Dan’s podiatry residency) will have a more active juggling club.

Here is an article from my high school newspaper, way back in 1987. Note the happenin’ ’80s hair—oh yeah, baby. The article mentions juggling rubber chickens… at the time I had bought three of those hollow rubber chickens at a gag shop and stuck a dowel through each. It went through their neck and down one leg. The problem was that they were horribly balanced for juggling, plus the other leg had no support, so it would just sort of flail around. Several years later I found actual juggling prop rubber chickens, but I have never bought any.

Updated 10/08

— 06:03:51 PM
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