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First Juggler On The Streets Marks 20 Year Anniversary

Ray Jason, who began the modern tradition of street juggling by flinging torches in front of San Francisco's Hyatt Regency Hotel in 1971, is still at it.

This summer he celebrates 20 years of a sometimes tough struggle to make street performing legal and respectable. He returned from service aboard an ammunition ship in the Vietnam theatre in 1971 and wanted to "separate himself from the war machine." So, without much of an idea of what he was doing, he put on some tights, a frilly shirt and beret and took his torches down to a street fair.

His act improved steadily, but he spent a lot of time playing tag with the police and the legal system. Jason refused to budge, and always found a way to return from the station house to the streets. The city finally settled on ways to accommodate him and other jugglers who demanded their freedom of expression.

He knew early on that street juggling was not just a stepping stone, but a career. The city was never for him a step to another place, but a place in itself where he could become well known and respectable. The sign on his prop table says, "Ray Jason - San Francisco Street Performer - AND PROUD OF IT!"

With a self confident nature and determination to become a San Francisco folk hero, Jason has gained more acclaim in two decades than any other street performer. He has been official juggler of the San Francisco 49er football team for 10 seasons, he performed for the Queen of England during her visit to that city, and the occasion of his 10th anniversary was marked as "Ray Jason Day" in a mayoral proclamation.

How long does he intend to keep it up? He told a writer two years ago, "I'm a 42-yearold guy who juggles bowling balls. I want to be a 52-year-old guy who juggles bowling balls."

Will Computer Animation Teach Juggling Patterns?

Using computer graphics as a juggling teaching tool is an idea that intrigues many people. It has been "tossed around" the electronic JUGGLEN network for several months now, with discussions of various approaches to the technological problems involved. The networkers are hoping to use math to generate patterns no one has seen before, and to program a computer to take the mathematical notation of these new patterns and show what it would look like to do them.

People are approaching this technologically demanding challenge on many fronts. Christopher Watson, an engineer at Silicon Beach Software in San Diego, explained one way to get a graphic juggling output in an article in the Spring 1991 issue of MacTech Journal.

He wrote a basic three-baIl cascade pattern to demonstrate the high-speed animation capabilities of that company's product, Supercard 1.5. It shows two hands and three balls floating on the screen, cascading in an endless loop. It can be run at varying speeds from slow motion to real-time. The article explains the concept of creating the animation in Supercard, and also lists the complete line code for those who want to try it themselves.

The main idea is to precalculate the locations of the three bails and the two hands at various intervals of time during each cycle, and then update the locations at each time interval. At the end of the article, Watson says that "without too much more work, it would be very possible to create variations on the path the balls and hands take, switching between them randomly by feeding new coordinate lists into the "animate BaIls handler."

Watson admitted in a telephone interview it would take some time and expertise to revise the program for different patterns, but he does believe it could be an effective teaching tool.

The Silicon Beach crew might be a logical group to take on the challenge. Watson says there's a set of beanbags on almost every desk, and folks can be found juggling individually or in groups frequently during the work day. Watson himself, though, didn't know how to juggle when he wrote the article! He said, though, that a friend is teaching him now!