For RIT you have to take two “wellness” (PE) classes to graduate. When looking through the class schedule I didn’t see a lot that I was interested in, but I settled on bowling to start with. Then in spring 2007 I signed up for juggling. Ever since I got the Klutz book of juggling, I’ve been able to juggle the basic 3-ball cascade, but at class and online I saw how much more you could do with throwing things in the air. Pretty soon I was doing the reverse cascade, shower, and Mills Mess. Even better, the spring quarter is when the annual RIT Spring Juggle-In occurs, which attracts 400+ people to Clark Gym between Friday night and Sunday afternoon. The gym is full of people on Saturday, with workshops and contests followed by a big show that evening. IV takes up some of my time on Friday evenings and church on Sunday morning, but I went for a good portion of the rest of the festivities.
After juggling class is when the juggling club meets, so I stayed after for a while some weeks. This fall I was no longer in the class, but I joined the club for real. The club is rather small and informal, so the first meeting of the year involved questions like, “Okay, who wants to be president?” Eric ended up with the title, and has done a fine job at it. I volunteered to help update the web site to the standards of the new millennium, though I haven’t actually had time to do it yet.
Last week, around came the 31st annual juggle-in. Jeff Peden, juggling instructor and de facto leader of the juggling club, is also the coordinator of the juggle-in. As a club member, I helped with a bunch of the setup and such. The big thing I did was to run the music for the show from my computer. Jeff’s son Wes did a fine job of that last year, but he’s off becoming a better juggler in Sweden now, so I offered to take on the job. I like computers and audio and behind the scenes stuff, so it was perfect. I collected music from all the performers beforehand and assembled it into a playlist, so all I had to do was click on each one as they performed. After the show it came to my attention that FOX was going to have a story about us on the news at 10, so I got online and had my brother set up my TV-recording MythTV computer to catch it. I later poked around the web sites for the other stations and picked up some more videos, which I collected and posted online. There’s a lot more I could say about the juggle-in, but it was generally excellent.
Then last night the club was invited to come to the Up ‘Til Dawn fundraiser and juggle, to entertain and teach interested people how to do the same. It’s supposed to go until 5 am, but we were invited to be there midnight to 1 am. Ben, Eric, Katie, Zach, Kassie, Jeff, Rachel (his daughter), and I showed up around 11:45, and some of us stayed until 3 am. We did a lot of juggling, and taught a bunch of people how to juggle, ride a unicycle, or balance on a rolling globe. I managed to do the latter while juggling 3 balls for the first time (I’d just balanced a number of times before), and took a shot at the unicycle.
Juggling is fun. I’ve finally found a physical activity that I enjoy. It requires thought and dexterity, but it doesn’t involve running around with a bunch of people and getting tired. It’s a solo activity, which appeals to me, but it can also be done with others, whether passing or just hanging around. I hope we have more opportunities to just juggle with people like last night.