The pair competed last year in Denver, but felt the time they spent on presentation in the interim made the difference between last year's second place and this year's first place finish. "Anytime you rip off your clothes on stage, you know it's a  winner," Morse joked. He added, "Last year we were just juggling to music, but this year we juggled to music with a theme that carried throughout the act, and worked hard to come up with a logical beginning, middle and end of the routine."

 

They began with a shaky two-man high machete juggle, with Morse standing on a rola bola, but regained their confidence with subsequent ball and club work on level ground. They did a two-person seven ball bounce and spent the rest of the act in a dynamic demonstration of club passing to popular TV themes familiar from The Dick Van Dyke Show, I Dream of Jeannie and Entertainment Tonight. After six and seven club passing with tricks, and eight front-to-front and back-to-back, the theme to "Mission Impossible" accompanied their nine club passing finale.

 

Morse has been performing at Disneyland in California for about three years, and Wee has worked there for a year. They have been performing as a team for a year, and left Baltimore for engagements at the Laguna Beach, Calif., Sawdust Festival and Minnesota Renaissance Fair. They will also perform at midwest colleges this fall.

 

The second place team this year was Doubble Troubble, the Baltimore hometown team of twins Nick and Alex Karvounis. Performing to a musical score, they came out on stage on giraffe unicycles for their first club passing sequence, then performed the rest of their act on the floor. They did some inventive multiplex passing with six clubs and passed up to nine clubs. Third went to Jack Kalvan and Rick Rubenstein, performing as Clockwork. This duo has been working together at Kings Island theme park near Cincinnati all summer, and showed the convention crowd some very inventive two-person four club take-away and walk -around patterns.