The hottest new prop at the festival was Semcycle's glow balls. Proprietor Carhlo Abraham helped create the two designs, one which glows red internally, and the other which shoots red laser beams outside from the eight LECD's exposed on its skin. They both are rubber skinned and filled with silicone for durability, employ a heart pacemaker battery, run for 3 hours on a charge and recharge thousands of times. If you thought silicone balls were expensive, though, check these out at $90 each!

 

Voting in the annual election, IJA members retained basically the same board of directors as served last year. The only new member is actually an old member, Mike Vondruska, who rejoined in a spot vacated by Jek KelIy. Those reelected were Deena Frooman, Art Jennings, Paul Kyprie, Bud Markowitz, Perry Rubenfeld and Steve Salberg. The board reelected Rubenfeld as its chair, and he will serve his third year in that capacity.

 

To avoid reelection of the entire board each year, IJA by-laws were changed so that directors will from now on serve two-year terms. The terms will be staggered, with elections for half of the available slots held each year. It was determined that Kyprie, Jennings and Frooman will serve for the next year, while Markowitz, Rubenfeld, Salberg and Vondruska will serve the first two year terms. With the Life Member Fund fully replenished at about $76,000 and finances now in order, the board agreed to concentrate its efforts in the coming year on membership growth.

 

If history had taken a different course, the IJA might have ended up in Burlington in 1983 rather than 1994. But members would have been juggling in a gym with a dirt floor covered with plywood! Henry Lappen founded the Jugglers From Mars club in Burlington in 1979, and literally hopped a freight train and rode it cross-country from Burlington to Fargo to attend his first IJA fest in 1980. He arrived at the IJA fest in Santa Barbara in 1982 with a full-blown pro­posal for taking the fest to Burlington the following year. His package had everything except a good gymnasium. Patrick Gym didn't exist at the time, but Lappen figured IJAers wouldn't mind juggling on plywood laid over the dirt floor of another gym in town.

 

The membership, which voted on festival sites in those days, also received a proposal from Gene Jones to stage a corporate-sponsored fest complete with big theatre and big name public show star (Michael Davis) at SUNY-Purchase. The two festival sites and their proponents represented clashing philosophies within the membership, with one group prefering small, inexpensive and quiet festivals and the other side proposing a more main-line, high-profile event. The issue became quite contentious, and boiled down to a race for the IJA presidency between Jones and Eric Roberts.

 

Jones won the election by just a few votes and the IJA went to Purchase in 1983 instead of Burlington. "The whole tenor of the IJA changed with that one vote," Lappen said. But someone suggested that the Jugglers from Mars hold their festival anyway, and Lappen carried through. He organized a five-day, $25 registration (including food and lodging) alternative festival for the week before the Purchase festival. He recalls it as a happy, socially conscious event that attracted about 100 people and culminated in a public show with performers like Murph, Arsene and Waldo.

 

The proceedings included a long discussion of what juggling and the IJA should be, with the participants favoring fun, no competitions and using juggling to make the world a better place. Lappen and his performing partner, Tom Ryburn, carried through with that mission in a 1986 trip to strife-torn Nicaragua to juggle with the Nicaraguan State Circus. Graham Ellis got involved two years later and founded Jugglers for Peace, which arranged performance tours of Nicaragua and Cuba for several groups of interested performers.

 

Lappen now lives and performs solo in Amherst, Mass., but was happy to be back in his old stomping grounds at the Burlington festival. He said he feels somewhat vindicated that the IJA finally arrived there, and hoped that all in attendance took back to their homes a bit of the spirit of juggling as a force for good and equality in the world, a spirit that Burlington nurtured dearly in those earlier times.  

 

For the fifth year in a row, the CBS Morning Show broadcast live from the Burlington festival. Performers appearing in two short segments this year included Masahiro Mizuno with kendama tricks, Darn Good &: Funny, David Deeble with brief and silly stunts, Fred Garbo as the inflatable man, Michael Menes rolling around on large globes and Randy Judkins clowning with members of the Vermont Youth Orchestra, which backed up the segment of the latter three performers. That trio also did a nine ring line and finished their segment with a group fire display.  

 

Auctioneer Braidy Brown and his crew netted more than $2,600 on 80 items that generous individuals and propmakers donated for the annual IJA auction. Top dollars were paid for Kris Kremo's autographed hat ($160), knives from Freaks of England ($140), lighted balls from Fly-by­Night ($130), and a three club hologram ($99). After Albert Lucas autographed a bottle of "Albert Lucas Blanc" wine donated to the auction by the Renegades, it netted $35 ("Not a bad markup, considering I paid $2.99 for it in a sale bin," said Tom Renegade). An antique unicycle went for $41, a single antique juggling post card for $25, and two 25-pound cases of Hershey mint mini chocolate bars fetched $25 and $14.