Mark Hayward Is My Hero

I just learned that March 5-6 will be the last Juggle This juggling festival to be held at Pratt. The convention is getting the boot. It’s very sad. Come join the fun for the last one. I’ll be there.

Yup, I’m in the news again.  Thankfully, once again it’s for juggling, and the photo is not a mug shot.

Article in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review about the Not Quite Pittsburgh Juggling Festival this weekend.  I’ll be in the gym hanging out and juggling, as well as closing the show on Saturday night.  Maybe I’ll see you there.  (QuakerValley Middle School in Sewickley.  Show starts at 6:30 pm Saturday.)

I’m spending a long weekend with my cousin and family in Leonia NJ. Today we went to the bakery, and were met at the door by the largest pile of butter I have ever seen. It was awesome.

Worth Their Weight in Butter: My Cousin Scott and his daughter Frances at Balthazar Bakery in Englewood NJ

I had a shockingly good chocolate chip cookie, and we brought home a giant, and delicious, loaf of bread.

Other highlights so far:

• didn’t get lost on the way here
• played a surprise game of soccer with my dog
• got yelled at by a NY cop
• juggled tennis balls representing the Jewish Matriarchs and Patriarchs for Tot Shabbat at the local Synagogue
• got recognized as being from Pittsburgh by the grocery bag I had the tennis balls in

Unfortunately I was not able to connect with my NYC juggler pals, but I’ve got a whole day and a half left in Leonia, so who knows what else might go down.

Behold the Mega-Wagon!!!

I saw these guys last year too.  Maybe next year I’ll have the patience to actually talk to them and find out what the story is here.  That HAS to be heavy and hard to pull.

Today is the start of the Shoebox Tour!  I hung out with the guys last night as they were rehearsing, and I’m REALLY looking forward to the show.   It starts at 7:00 tonight at the Nicolet High School theater here in Milwaukee.  It goes to Madison WI next for a show on Sunday night, and then off to Chicago on August 14th.

Today was the last day of the International Jugglers Association Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It was awesome. If you juggle you HAVE to go to an IJA festival. It’s just amazing. The Saturday night public show may have been the best show I’ve ever seen. Check out Get The Shoe, they totally stole the show. After saying my goodbyes to my friends I headed up to Elkin to visit my Uncle Bill. He lives way out of town in a nice log home that he built when he retired, and in the basement he has a giant train set that he is building. It’s awesome.

It has two gauges of track so he can run the two different size trains that met up in a town in Colorado back at the end of the steam locomotive era. Uncle Bill showed me a bunch of the things he’s working on, and I even got to drive a train. The last time I was here none of the trains were running yet, so it was great to see them in action. He even has digital trains that you can run with a wireless remote control, and they have sound! I was worried that the sound might be dumb, but was actually really high quality and added a lot. I can’t wait until the next time I get to come here.

Woke up late today at around 10:00.  Listened to a little Within Temptation (metal band with a female lead singer) on YouTube.  Took Lenore to work.  Walked the dog.  Had a light lunch consisting of a yogurt and some Ass-Kickin’ Snack Mix which says right on it that it is “Kick Yo Ass Hot!”  And, as it turns out, it is.  Went out to the garage and got my tools organized to put the radiator back on my family’s 1930 Model A Ford.  Had to cut short workin’ on the car to go to a event for the artistic community that is trying to get established in Indianapolis called “Culturati”.  Came home, walked the dog, ate dinner, made juggilng balls out of old tennis balls to use tomorrow at a gig where I will be teaching race-car drivers how to juggle in order to improve their hand-eye coordination and reaction time.  Got a call from a buddy telling me that his dogs might have given my dog Whip Worms.  Ick.  Ate Brittish candy bar that I bought in San Francisco called “Toffee Crisp”.  It was yummy.

The Daily Illini Newspaper found me at the Champaign-Urbana Jugglefest

Having just finished another great MadFest juggling convention I have come to a better understanding of why there was such a controversy over the popularity of the Chris Bliss video that swept the internet a while back. (If you haven’t already seen it, check it out here before you read the rest of this article.)

MadFest is the annual regional juggler’s convention that is held each January in Madison Wisconsin. I have helped organize it to one degree or another since it started. For the last six years I have been in charge of the Public Show.

This year, as usual, we had a fantastic show. We had great jugglers like Luke Wilson (Brittish, living in Germany) and the Dew Drop Jugglers (Minneapolis/St. Paul MN) and we had great variety acts like The Rope Warrior (Chicago) and the Flybar Pogo Stick Demo Team (Chicago/Ohio), and sold out our 1300 seat theater once again. It’s always a challenge convincing people to go to the show, but once they go they are usually astonished at how great it was. For the most part, once people have seen the show they make it a family tradition to go every year. Initially it was frustrating to me that people didn’t seem to believe me that the show was going to be good enough to be worth seeing. I eventually got over the fact that not everyone thinks juggling is as cool as I do, although that never seemed like the whole story. This year I think I have seen the light, and my frustration has changed to a slightly different form: I think that American society no longer believes that live entertainment is worth the trouble.

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Tomorrow I leave for Madison WI to start the ramp-up to the MadFest Juggling Festival.  I have to go earlier this year than usual because I will be doing a radio interview on Tuesday morning (at 6:30 am… ug) on Z104.  As usual I’m really looking forward to the fest, and a bunch of my favorite people in the whole world are coming, so it should be a blast.

Also, we will once again have the Wisconsin State Yo-yo Contest at MadFest this year.  Unfortunately, this was the year of starting everything later than I should have, so there aren’t many details up about the contest yet, but that should change soon.

This last weekend I was in Ithaca NY to be the MC for the Cornell Juggling Club’s public show at their Big Red JuggleFest. It was a great time. First of all, juggling festivals are always great. If you don’t spend your time hanging out and talking with people, like I usually end up doing, you can just juggle ALL DAY. What a great way to spend a day.

I was hanging out with some of my New York City pals: Sean Blue, Marcus Monroe, Paris, and Sean’s non-juggling buddy Herman, who turned out to be a cool guy despite that fact that he’s not a juggler. Ithaca was really hard to navigate for most of the out of town guests, and we got lost every time we went anywhere. It was not awesome.

The show was on Saturday night, and was really high caliber. It took place in a former top quality theater that has been converted into a lecture hall on the Cornell campus. I understand that a university probably needs a lecture hall more than a theater, but as a performer it was really hard to look at what obviously used to be a great theater, and was now just a shadow of its former self. It still had the orchestra pit, but the new wall was only six inches back from the edge of the pit, and there was no longer a backstage. Strangely, there was a brand new greenroom with a bathroom, but that was it.

My sets in the show went over great, and the show went very smoothly. Thomas Dietz, from Germany, was the headliner and we had a whole slew of other great acts. See more (and download the poster!) here: http://rso.cornell.edu/cjc/festival/performers.htm