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Yes, he is a performer as well as a teacher, and juggling is an integral part of his solo show. One long-time routine involves a jumbo-sized, cantankerous devil stick. "I've imbued it with a cranky personality," he said. "I perform in pantomime and it begins pulling me around. It won't leave the stage."

He does a cigar box balance intentionally crafted to leave the audience in nervewracked laughter. "I get into a situation where I balance a nine-box herringbone stack on my chin for quite a while. I build up tension by working for a long time to start juggling three clubs, acting like the stack is just barely under my control."

He's lately been enthralled by the resurgence of popularity of the diablo. He said, "My diablo routine is the one piece in the show I do for myself. I perform it to a piece of New Age music because the diabolo has a certain lyrical line that that type of music accompanies well."

He also performs three, four, five and six rings, and twirls a lariat in the persona of a cowboy.

A most recent innovation is the creation of an inflatable costume. Saying, "Everyone should have one of these, it's the latest in fashion trends!" Garbo pulls on a purple nylon, limp and lifeless jump suit. With the flip of a switch the suit inflates until nothing but Garbo's head, hands and feet are visible. Audiences are eventually howling with laughter as "Fred Zeplin,"

seemingly a modest 600 pounds, breaks into a rather active dance and tumbling routine to the Blues Brothers music, "Do You Love Me Now That I Can Dance?"

Garbo first performed with his revolutionary, portable inflatable sets in Brisbane, Australia at World Expo' 88. Besides the inflatable man, which he describes as merely a "living cartoon," he also uses an inflatable backdrop to provide comic physical illusions. It is, in essence, simply a wall, 3-1/2 feet high and ten feet long. But he turns it into a variety of inanimate objects. His physical illusions with it lead the audience to believe he is smoothly riding down an imaginary escalator, rising up in an elevator and falling down a set of stairs.

Designed by George York of Portland, Maine, these battery-operated, fan-inflatable pieces provide unique, engaging entertainment for Garbo's audiences. Other inflatables are now under development for a whole show called "Inflatable Living, Part I."

The traditional college route dissatisfied Garbo when it came time to choose a career path. A Buffalo, N. Y., native, he had interests in magic and gymnastics as a teenager. But magic didn't fulfill all his needs, and gymnastics was rough on the body. He asked his magic teacher about juggling, and was introduced to Paul Kois. "I got tired of being around magicians," he said. "People thought their problem was just needing to buy a new trick. With juggling, it was easier to see if you had the skill or not. It was also a translation of gymnastic skill in away. But instead of flipping yourself around, you flipped the props around. And that didn't hurt as much when you fell!"

In 1973 he took a workshop from Tony Montanero at Celebration Mime Theatre in Maine. Montanero encouraged Garbo to weave his skills in dance, juggling and magic together into a performance. He put together an act with Gillian Hannant, and the couple played festivals and schools in the Northeast for four years. "She was the first person I passed with on stage," Garbo said. "We used to do eight rings in our show. That was a big deal at the time."

The IJA had traditional strength in that part of the country, and Garbo decided to attend the 1975 convention in Youngstown, Ohio. He met Allan Jacobs, later to become an IJA champion and regular workshop leader, and learned to pass clubs. Jacobs and Garbo attended the 1978 convention in Eugene, Oregon, together and won the Teams Competition, beating the "Flying Karamazov Brothers." But Garbo recognized something inherently strange about the victory. "We did a lot of tricks in the three minutes while the K' s did a lot of talking and hardly got around to juggling at all. I was concerned that competitions at that point were pushing technique instead of performance, and I made that statement at the business meeting the next day because I spoke up, they elected me championships director."

Garbo changed the championships scoring to account for performance as well as technique, and expanded the available time for routines from three minutes to seven. That basic format is still in place today, making Garbo the creator of the modem IJA championships structure.