PRATIE PLACE

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Friday, April 06, 2007

[Hannah]: Why You Should Never Trust Street Performers

Last night I was at a bar with some of the Urban Caballero's actor friends. One of them is a crazy Australian guy who is currently training to be in the flying Karamazov brothers (a juggling show). One of this guy's friends was complaining that he was spending countless hours hogging her living room for his juggling practice, because his own living room didn't have high enough ceilings.

He began to explain to us how to juggle chainsaws. Apparently, you have to replace each chainsaw's circular handle with a stick handle, so that it juggles the same way a bowling pin does. You then have to reverse the direction of the engine, so that it provides some backspin against the direction of your toss. Then, um, you just juggle it.

Then he began to reminisce about his days as a street performer in Australia. "I had this trick where I'd lay people down on the sidewalk and walk between and over them while I was juggling chainsaws," he said.

"Oh, yeah?" we asked. "What's the trick?"

"Oh, there's no trick," he said. "You just have to not drop the chainsaws."

We thought about this for a moment, and he began explaining his other trick, which was to have a volunteer hold an apple in his mouth while he wrote his name on it with a running chainsaw.

"How could you be sure the volunteer wouldn't flinch?" we asked.

"Well, my mate would stand behind him and wrap his arms around him to prevent him from moving... but basically, we just had to tell him he really should do his best to stand still."

2 Comments:

At 9:15 AM, Blogger Alma said...

Oh man, I'm getting the jitters just thinking about it! Great story, though!

 
At 3:41 PM, Blogger novelera said...

Many, many years ago, in Sunnyvale, California, I worked with a guy who was a member of the Flying Karamazov Brothers. Very entertaining and interesting person. We were his day job. He used to juggle in the halls at work. He had almost waist length hair and wore sort of "bohemian, late hippie" clothes like loose cotton drawstring pants, etc. For our Halloween party, he cut his hair into a conservative cut, wore a three-piece suit and carried a briefcase into work. We nearly dropped dead laughing.

 

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