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Shayna Caul of Norwalk, a New York City special-education teacher and professional juggler, uses the sport to help her students improve their results.
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Shayn Caul in the Norwalk Advocate
Saturday August 7, 2004
Vol. 175 No. 115 / 26 pages 2 sections
It's a Tossup
Teacher proves you are never to old to juggle
By Alison Damast - Staff Writer
NORWALK - When Shayna Caul walks through the fruit and vegetable aisles at Stew Leonard's, she often can't help herself from grabbing a few tomatoes and tossing them up in the air.
Shoppers pull themselves away from their carts to watch Caul, a professional Juggler, gracefully keeping as many as five pieces of produce aloft at one time.
"It is always very embarrassing to anybody who is with me," Caul said. "You have to watch out when I go by the lemons, limes, and kiwis because that is particularly dangerous."
Juggling has become second nature to Caul, 56, a longtime Norwalk resident who took up the sport about four years ago. She has since established herself as a professional juggler and headlined shows such as the Juggle That Extravaganza in New York City, and event this April that featured champion jugglers from around the world.
A spunky woman, Caul jokingly refers to herself as a senior citizen juggler. The sport has slowly crept into all aspects of her life, including her career as special education teacher in the New York City's public schools.
This fall, she will teach with the Cirque du Soliel Circus Arts Program and will also teach juggling and special education at the Bronx Theatre High School.
Caul has become somewhat of a sensation in the juggling world.
"Most of the people that are really good started when they were seven, eight, or nine," said Connie Leaverton, a juggler and filmmaker who is featuring Caul in an upcoming documentary on women jugglers, "Trailblazers: Women Who Juggle."
"She (Caul) started when she was around 50. I wanted to use her in my documentary as a motivational representation that juggling is not only for all ages, but you can begin juggling at any point in your life and be good at it."
In her trademark black tuxedo and red bowler hat, Caul wore and impish smile on her face last Friday as she flung five crystal balls into the air and later deftly tossed red and blue clubs in a circle several feet in the air.
Never taking her eyes off the balls, she even managed to use a cane to send her bowler hat flying toward the ceiling. Seconds later, it landed gently on her head.
"I love this music," she shouted as the soundtrack from the musical "Chicago" blared out of the stereo at a studio in the Women's Fitness Edge, a gym in Westport where she practices.
Her "All That Jazz" juggling and dance routine has drawn praise from Gov. M. Jodi Rell, who watched Caul perform during a visit to Stamford Hospital earlier this year. As a volunteer HAHA-clown at the hospital, Caul performs her juggling tricks for patients all over the hospital as Dr. Juggles.
"Shayna has done a tremendous thing in terms of her career ito come so far, so quickly and so late in life," said Paul Mordoff, the past president of the Stamford Health and Humor Associates and a professional clown who has hired Caul for various parties. "To start something brand new and become so good at it is encouraging somebody middle-ages who wants to try something new."
Caul also won acclaim from her fellow jugglers during her performance in the Juggle That Extravaganza this spring.
"Shayna's thing is going after that old-school classic feel. The hat and cane stuff makes you think of the Rat Pack and the bygone era of the upscale 1940's," said Sky King, a fellow juggler who met Shayna as a teacher in the Big Apple Circus Educational Program.
Caul, a Brooklyn, N.Y. native whose stage name is "Shayna, the Juggling Entertaina," began her juggling career when she was on a teaching sabbatical several years ago.
She was taking a drawing class with a group of teachers when the instructor encouraged his class to try juggling to improve their eye-hand coordination.
He also passed out a research article to the class which explained how juggling can help raise the reading scores of remedial readers.
Before Caul knew it, 30 teachers were throwing balls around the small classroom, knocking over easels and drawing paper as they tried to catch their runaway tosses.
The juggling experiment traumatized all the teachers, with the exception of Caul, who promptly went home and bought a book titled "Juggling for the Complete Klutz."
After a few weeks of practicing in her living room in her pajamas, she slowly started gaining confidence. She had officially caught the juggling bug.
"I juggle three balls and it looks easy, but they don't know it took me three months to do it," Caul said. "I went from being sure that I absolutely couldn't do this to learning the right way with the right equipment."
With a year of juggling experience under her belt, Caul summoned up the courage to join the Carmine Street Irregulars, a group of professional and amateur jugglers who practice every week at a gym on Carmine Street in New York.
Caul soon learned how to juggle five balls, an essential skill that lifts a performer from amateur to professional status.
Her jazzy "Chicago" routine caught the eye of Viveca Gardiner, a fellow Carmine Street juggler.
Gardiner invited Caul to be on the bill of the Juggle That Extravaganza, a production that featured renowned performers such as the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus and award-winning international performers, most of them children of teenagers.
"I invited her to perform for sentimental and for political reasons because she is a woman and because she is from a non-traditional background," said Gardiner, a professional juggler who is president of Playful Productions, the booking company that organized the extravaganza.
"What I did not expect was that she would actually be a high point of the show and she was."
Before the show, Caul said she was overwhelmed with stage fright.
"I couldn't eat, and for me not to eat is a very serious thing," Caul said.
She briefly considered bowing out of the performance, but stuck it out and performed her "All That Jazz" routine to a cheering house.
Leaverton, who was in the audience that night, taped Caul's performance and will include segments of it in her documentary.
"I was the oldest person in the show and the newest to juggling. I was quite a thing there," Caul said. "In the juggling world you are a senior if you are over 18."
Age has not stood in the way of Caul's successful side career as a performer. It has also helped her become much slimmer - she has lost 60 pounds since she started juggling.
She has performed at varied venues such as the reopening of the Place Theatre in Stamford, private parties and the CBS "Early Show."
She gets most of her gigs by word of mouth, but is currently workong on a Web site, www.jugglerjazz.com, which will feature links on how to make juggling balls, instructions on how to juggle and a list of suppliers and manufacturers for juggling equipment.
Caul said she cannot help but pass her love of juggling to her students. For the past few years, she has helped the special-education students in her class build juggle balls out of balloons and rice, as well as teach them a few of her tricks.
She is starting a new job this year as a special education teacher at the Bronx Theatre High School, where she will also teach a special juggling physical education session every week.
Deborah Effinger, principal of of the Bronx Theatre High Schoo, said finding Caul was like a match made in heaven. "She is a gem."
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