Their third act is largely comedy acrobatics, "body balancing with a little levity," as Meg explains it. She gets stuck in contorted positions and Sean has to pull her out of them. They do a two person tank roll that ends with them seated in a chair. The act ends with a trick Sean and former circus partner Charlie Fry, used to perform. Meg stands on Sean's head, then jumps down in front of him as he stretches his oversized pair of pants out so she can land feet-first in them with him!

If the cruise ship wants to buy another act, Meg can bring her 500 pounds of motorized acrobatics hoop along on the cruise and perform a solo act in the midst of its smoke and lights.

 

Those who have done it say it's very difficult to ride a unicycle or maintain a balance of herringbone-stacked cigar boxes on the sometimes wobbly floor of a cruise ship. Jay Green, who first rode the waves 20 years ago, said he performed through a hurricane one time that absolutely prevented his unicycle entrance on stage. Ben Decker found that bowling balls can be tricky in high seas. He said, "When the ship goes up, it's much heavier. The waves play with gravity in some very weird ways."

 

And Green warns that an audience under the influence of seasickness will almost always pan the juggler, no matter how good the show was.

 

Low ceilings (7-8 feet on most ships) are notorious obstacles, but not cited as an overwhelming problem. If the audience is seated at the same level as the performer, jugglers must not only avoid the ceiling, but avoid juggling low tricks that members of the audience can't see.

 

Not all ships are small, however. Mark Nizer worked Royal Carribean Cruise Line's "Sovereign of the Seas," which he said is the biggest ship afloat. "It was like a regular Vegas stage," said Nizer. "There was great lighting, a balcony and everything. And there was enough ceiling height to do eight rings ­ but not nine."

 

Cruise lines may hire their jugglers through entertainment agencies or may book people directly. Mark Nizer said it's worth seeking out and applying directly to the cruise line, but that it always looks better if you have an agent searching out work for you.

 

Dick Franco, who has worked occasionally on cruise lines since 1983, said, "The major thing is personalities. You work for a cruise director, and sometimes you have to jump around from one line to another line until you find people you can get along with."

 

The Emerys got their first shipboard job shortly after their 1985 marriage. Meg was trained as a trapeze artist and performed in New York for several years. They were each performing solo at the time of their marriage, but a period during which one was in Japan and the other in Canada convinced them they had to merge their skills into a single act that could travel together.

 

Sean told a little white lie to the Bramson Entertainment Bureau in New York when offered a job on a Helsinki-to-Stockholm ferry and said that Meg was part of his act. "She was a juggler before she knew it," Sean said, and they were off to Scandinavia for seven weeks.

 

They found another seven week cruise running from Los Angeles to the Mexican Riveria and down to South America. They did some one week cruises through the Caribbean, then were signed to a seven week cruise going from Singapore to India. "We got to see some places we'd never get to go otherwise," said Meg, "like Thailand, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and the Andaman Islands."

 

And they'll never forget the experience of juggling for the Andaman Islanders one stiflingly hot day, making friends and watching elephants work in the lumber yards. They didn't speak the language, of course, but had long ago learned on cruises with international passengers that "a smile will get you a long way."

 

That experience rivaled another in their growing store of worldwide juggling memories that followed soon thereafter. The next cruise was for eight weeks through the Mediterranean, and included a stop in Venice. A student of commedia del' arte, Sean dressed in his character and performed in St. Marks Square at 5:30 one morning for street sweepers and pigeons in the city where commedia began.

 

Comedy juggler Jack Swersie has worked on a half-dozen cruises, including one unique cruise 1,000 miles up the Amazon River into the heart of Brazil. "It was the most incredible experience in my life," he said.

 

Swersie encourages jugglers to look on cruise work as "an opportunity to travel and work very little and pretend you're a passenger the rest of the time. I was in the Amazon 3-1/2 weeks, did a total of 84 minutes of work, made damn good money, and got to get off the ship to strange places and pretend I was just another tourist."

 

The Emergys believe their marriage has been good for their cruise career. Sean said, "I think people like seeing a husband and wife team. A lot of older people ask us if we're married, and we show them our rings. They like that, they feel safer with it and think it's wholesome."

 

That type of high moral standard must be strictly observed on cruises. "It can force you to adjust your lifestyle for the better... at least it was that way for me," said Sean. All ship employees must dress well, refrain from heavy drinking and always be courteous to passengers. "You have to be a social person," Meg said. "If a passenger wants to ask you 20 questions, you've got to answer them all politely, Sometimes it's too much, so we just stay in our cabin and run movies on the VCR."

 

Passengers can also, in effect, black­ball an entertainer by giving the act a low rating on questionnaire cards they mark for the management. Sean explained, "You may have a seven week contract, but it says in your contract that the line can replace you after any week if they don't like you."

 

The audience was more of a challenge off stage for one entertainer than on stage. Beside putting on a show, he was a table host in the dining room. "You're expected to keep the conversation going and play social host every night," he said. "Can you imagine being in your mid-20's and being stuck at a table every night for supper with people 65-90? Whew!"

 

Other than maintaining decorum, showing up for a few mandatory parties and performing occasionally, shipboard performers are free to do what they want. That's appealing, but as Sean Emery said, "It's like being stuck on a rock in the ocean. It may seem like a floating amusement park, but you can only ride the roller coaster so many times before you get bored with it."

 

Mark Nize:r said he uses his free time to write jokes and get a tan. Dick Franco uses his to write books. Another person cautioned, "Unless you're into drinking or gambling, there's just not a lot to do."

 

Dan Holzman also cautioned performers that the isolation can be harmful to your careers. He said, "No one sees you. You get a cruise for 6-8 weeks and you come back and you're out of it. Or a job comes up but you're off in the ocean between Singapore and Malaysia."

 

Still, no one seems to want to spend a whole life on the ocean. The Emerys say it's good work for saving money to buy a home in Minneapolis. That'll take them another five years, and then Sean hopes to find steady work close to that home. Dan Holzman, who likes to put jobs in the perspective of careers, says cruises are a good place to start, but not a good place to stay. They allow him to practice his solo routines away from Raspyni Brother partner Barry Friedman, but you'll never catch him bragging to Johnny Carson about it!