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You Could Hear the Pins Drop
By Sarah Maslin Nir
for The New York Times
See original article and photos here.
In a corner of a Brooklyn gymnasium on Tuesday night, two men flipped six–now seven, now eight!–metallic juggling pins between them. Two feet away, a young man whisked a giant yo-yo-like object toward the rafters. Another man, lying on his belly and arching like a performing seal, balanced a club on the tip of his nose. A woman nearby, brows furrowed in concentration, deftly sunk a basketball into a wastepaper basket on her head.
This was no three-ring circus. The two dozen people—object manipulators of all disciplines and skill levels—convened at the Pratt Institute gym in Clinton Hill for Jugglers Anonymous, a weekly practice session that draws professionals and hobbyists from across New York City. Tuesday night was their last meeting of the season.
They juggled, and they dropped. Pins, beanbags, chalice-shaped spinning yo-yos called diabolos, silicon balls (at about $35 a piece, they are "the Bentleys of juggling props," said a man who goes only by the name Paris)&mdsah;anything that went up, went down, up, and down again.
"I am the stud of diabolo," Robin Hu, 23, a software developer, said before flinging a plastic spinner 20 feet into the air. With an Indiana Jones move, he lashed at it as it fell.
He missed. This time.
As in any sport, elitism exists (seven-ball jugglers are its rock stars, plate spinners a joke, some said), but the atmosphere on Tuesday was pedagogic and experimental. Keith Nelson, who said he swallows swords because "fire eating isn't good for you," was trying out new hat tricks. Meike Fromm introduced a new finale for her cruise ship act: the makeshift basketball hoop. It needed work, a couple of her peers said.
After three hours of practice, some went out for Chinese food; others—with day jobs and starkly different lives to juggle—went home to bed, walking or unicycling off into the warm night.
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