He has found fresh impetus during the past few years through his relationship with Nathalie Enterline, a 25-year-old dancer with baton and hat who also appears on the Lido showbill. Besides her solo, Enterline plays the vital role of his on-stage assistant. Most viewers of the show hardly notice her, but Brunn says the four assistants he has employed on stage during his career have played a critical role in his performance.

 

"I began performing with Lotte and still today I must have a partner. She is almost invisible to the audience but essential to me. She must feed me the props very precisely, they must come at just the right moment. It takes a long time for someone to learn the rhythm of the act. When it is right we are almost !ike a dance team."

 

The first night Enterline assisted Brunn was in an emergenccy situation in 1980. He gave her the cues as they rode in a car to the performance. When the time came in the act for her to toss him six hoops he turned toward her and she threw them right by him and they clattered away on the other side of the stage. "It was the fun­niest thing I ever saw!" he said.

 

 Brunn has fashioned his own career while paying very little attention to other jugglers. In 1936 his father, owner of three thriving restaurants in Darmstadt, Germany, and a former national diving champion, took his son to see a stage show, "Menschen, Tieren, Sensationen, " in Berlin.

 

Brunn said he decided then and there he wanted to be a juggler rather than follow his father's entrepreneurial footsteps. He badgered his father into letting him attend a performing arts school, then gave his first performance with Lotte in 1939 in The Sun restaurant in Rossdorf. It was full of gymnastics and action. "We probably loved it more than the audience," he said. "I was so fast in my pirouettes that sometimes I lost the audience and ended up bowing to the orchestra! We were a big success from the beginning.

 

"For me juggling was like a toy. We had plenty of money and I didn't have to do it, but I wanted to do it. For me it was an adventure when I began, and still is such today. "

 

But the entertainment world around him has changed drastically since Brunn broke into the business. As nightclubs and circus declined, television has created an entertainment medium that emphasizes the bizarre rather than the artistic. While he doesn't agree with the style, he refuses to pass judgment against it.

 

"Nothing makes sense in entertainment today, " he said. "People are doing awful things but getting away with it because they have guts. Maybe I'm square, but the world seems crazy. Look at Tiny Tim. He made millions but he gave me a headache! But because it's crazy it's a success. Years ago he would have been arrested but today he's getting away with murder."

 

While he acknowledges that his own road to artistic satisfaction passed through a phase of numbers juggling, today he looks at juggling as athletic endeavor with disinterest. "In the beginning my idea was to juggle eight rings because I knew Rastelli juggled eight plates. I was in the Guinness book for two years when I was a kid and I was proud of that. But there weren't so many jugglers then. Where will it all end? I don't think we've reached the limit in numbers yet, but I don't think much about numbers any more.

 

"I can understand why a man wants to run the fastest 100 meters, but I don't believe in juggling competitions. It's like seeing who could paint a painting the fastest! "

 

What he seems to be saying is that while "more" played a role in early motivation, the word "better" was what counted in the end. In an interview at age 19, he said he figured he would give up juggling by age 25. Now, many, many years later, he sees no end to his juggling career. Instead, he dreams of gathering a small company of skilled friends to create a theatre production choreographed around their combined talents. It's just another step forward for a great artist.