After spending Monday afternoon with the Bruin Jugglers, I had a
chance to contemplate my juggling accomplishments on the walk back
to my apartment. I remember thinking, “Wow, I just learned a
pretty cool skill that I can add to my collection of cool things I
know how to do.”
On your way to class, you too may have seen the Bruin Jugglers
throwing a bunch of stuff in the air in front of Kerckhoff (they
meet there on Mondays from 3-5 p.m. and on Tuesdays from 12-2 p.m.)
and wondered how you could learn to juggle. I wondered the same
thing, so I walked up to the jugglers and asked to be taught.
While I learned the subtle art of juggling, the Bruin Jugglers
taught me the history of this fascinating sport and the formation
of their club. Bruin Jugglers was started last year by fourth-year
student Cathy Ton.
“It wasn’t a club; it was just two people standing
around juggling,” third-year student Jason Brown said.
The club features mostly skilled jugglers; however, that is not
to say the members of the club aren’t eager to teach. And I
was eager to learn.
I received a lot of my instruction from fourth-year student
Jordan Fassler, who first learned to juggle when he was 13 and is
one of the leaders of the club. First, our terse dialogue:
DM: What do you like about the club?
JF: The juggling.
I started with the basics of three-ball juggling, first throwing
one ball in the air, from hand to hand, then adding a second ball
and finally a third. Aiding Fassler in my education was fourth-year
student Abe Chuang and first-year student Ben Prusiner. Between the
three, I got instruction from jugglers in different fields. Chuang,
for example, specializes in three balls, and can do
Rubenstein’s Revenge. (Yes, they have names for moves.)
Fassler can juggle with his eyes closed. (“I’m in a Zen
state, no thoughts,” he said.) Prusiner learned to juggle in
grade school and is the group’s sole freshman. I asked if he
was recruited by UCLA for juggling.
DM: Did you come to UCLA because of the juggling club?
BP: No.
Spend any time with serious jugglers and you will quickly learn
they are very particular about the terminology of their sport.
While I was struggling with three measly beanbags, Fassler was
juggling several clubs in the air. I made the mistake of calling
the clubs “sticks.” This set off a firestorm of
comments.
“That is like calling a magician’s deck of cards a
stack of crackers,” second-year student David Riley said.
I asked Fassler how much the sticks cost, and he told me they go
for $30 each. That seems like a rip-off to me. So I said so.
“It’s not a rip-off considering how much pleasure
you derive from them,” Brown said.
With the talk about the sticks so serious, I wondered when
people have sticks does that mean they’ve really made it?
“No, that just means that they’ve bought
clubs,” Prusiner said.
I continued to soldier on with my lesson, and I was eventually
able to throw and catch three balls, using the cascade pattern (a
lot of juggling formations are named after water ““ cascade,
fountain, shower). The struggle was in getting myself to make the
fourth throw. While I worked on that, and more accurate tosses,
Fassler distracted me with a dissertation on the history of
juggling. Apparently, there are raging juggling festivals where
people drink and smoke pot. I am told that hippies like to
juggle.
Fassler also told me juggling can be lucrative ““ he once
earned $100 juggling at a frat party. I too learned juggling can be
quite lucrative because toward the end of the session, I
successfully threw and caught the three balls six times ““ the
minimum number for a technical juggle.
I felt like a million bucks.
E-mail Miller at dmiller@media.ucla.edu.