31-6,p7

MICHAEL MARLIN'S SECRET OF CONTINUOUS ENTERTAINMENT by Bill Giduz

Michael Marlin, "the bawdy braggart from Buckhead, Ga.," balances a flower on his nose and tells the crowd, "Look, I'm a blooming idiot!" During his recent show for 100 people in an Atlanta neighborhood club, he also admitted to being a juggling "honkie" (juggling horns, of course I and "the piece of trash at the top of the heap!"

With a constant line of jokes and repartee, he entertained the crowd non-stop for over two hours. He showed them an equal capability for outrageously awful puns and juggling of awesome dexterity.

Marlin, the MC of the Amherst convention public show, arrived at his first IJA convention in Sarasota, Fla., in 1973 lugging three real, live bowling pins. "They laughed at me," said Marlin. "They said 'What do you do with those?' I didn't know what Indian clubs were."

But in the time since then, he has applied himself purposefully to street juggling. It has paid off in a vast repertoire of performing material and stage poise.

Marlin has stepped quickly up juggling's ladder of fame during the past six years. There was a time when he juggled sausages in a mall to attract customers into a store. But he wanted to perform for himself and moved onstage into the street. He walked home at age 19 and told his woman, "Hello, I'm Michael Marlin and I'm a juggler."

There were to be no more pizza parlor or farm store jobs, he became a professional juggler and set his goals high. "I want to do for juggling what Doug Henning did for magic," Marlin said recently. "There wasn't a popular magician before him and now there's not a popular juggler. I want to move into that spot before someone else does!"

Marlin shared the stage with Henning and his magical contraptions on a 40-city tour during eight weeks last year. He claims he wasn't signed this year because he upstaged the star with his intermission routine. At the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, at least, this was true. After a heavy, unfathomable dose of Henning's illusions, the crowd reveled and cheered Marlin's totally visible manual manipulations and audible repartee. The two acts simply didn't mix.

He saw his name on the marquee at the Los Vegas Nugget with Connie Stevens and was televised on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert and the Mike Douglas Show.

But his rocketing career has sputtered a bit this year. Marlin finds the pomp and politics of show-biz painful.

"In the upper echelons it matters more who you know and how much money you have than how good you are," he laments. "I didn't do anything this summer and just local clubs and festivals now."

"It's tough being pro. You have to get an agent, you can't do it all yourself any more. I may have to move to L.A.

to hit the big time, but I like Atlanta a lot. I want my professional success to continue or I'll get into something else, like theatre." He was looking forward to his first trip overseas, scheduled to perform at AARAMCO oil bases in November.

Marlin has Atlanta to himself. He arrived in 1977 with a degree from Ringling's Clown College and won a talent contest at a nightclub. Between trips elsewhere, he still appears to appreciative crowds on the street around town. Last year he toured college campuses.

Both street and stage appeal to him. "The street is magical because the last thing people expect to see is a juggler.

But you can't get into many subtleties on the street, you have to keep it moving. People will watch a drunk walk by or a passing truck, but on stage the audience attention is focused on you. I can do music and take more time. A well-placed smirk will get a laugh."

His act keeps changing. He plays with juggling ideas in the high-ceilinged isolation of the house he shares with Tim Settimi, a mime. The challenge of seven balls is taking up a lot of his energy currently. Once he learns to control them, however, he will still have to devise a way to present the trick to the audience.

"I want to put all my juggling in some sort of theatrical context," he explained. "It makes more of a sensation."

Dance seemed to be the ideal presentation for the airiness of scarves, so he choreographed a scarf dance/juggle to classical music. It is one of the best skits he does. There's also the story of "The Man, The Woman and The Forces Of Evil," one of his earliest classics told to a three-ball beat. He does a Samuri fan dance and a bean bag ballet talked out to a litany of words all. starting with the letter "B."

His props are in a large wicker drum. There are balls, scarves, rings, fans, bean bags and jingle bells. Thurston Furbucks, the harried hand puppet from Gulp Oil, lives there in the company of axes, rings and boxes. Thurston has a yo-yo to play with and toilet paper for convenience!

When Marlin runs out of things to juggle in front of an audience, he's liable to run screaming across stage to hold their attention.