BY BILL GIDUZ

 

He appeared under dramatic blue lights, barefoot and dressed in black, eyes highlighted with makeup and staring intensely at his work. A punk song, "Ribbons," by Sisters of Mercy provided a driving beat for the stark tableau. He danced all over the stage with his di­abolo, striking poses as he swung the prop around his body and through the air. Every glare, glance and arch of the back was carefully considered and tirelessly rehearsed for maximum impact. He executed difficult stick releases and tricks with two diabolos flawlessly; drawing the audience in with his energy and difficult tricks. They rose to their feet in loud acclamation as he finished.

 

Fritz Grobe came to Fargo from Bloomington, Ind., where he has been living since early 1992. He grew up in Brunswick, Maine, the son of Bowdoin College math professors Charles and Elizabeth Grobe. Until his freshman year at Yale University; he seemed destined to follow their path into academia. Mathematics was his life as well as theirs. As a high school student at Brunswick High, he had the second highest score in North America on the American High School Math Exam, qualifying him for the American Invitational Math Exam. The national average of the 3,700 students invited to take that test was a 3.6. Fritz scored a 10! That qualified him for the 1986 U.S.A. Mathematics Olympiad, the highest honor for a math student in the country. He finished 14th out of the 93 students invited to that trial, a feat he considered his finest hour in the discipline.

 

It must have been an interesting conversation, indeed, when he told his parents he intended to drop out of college to pursue juggling full-time!

 

JW: Tell us what led to that decision and how it was greeted around the house.

FG: I started juggling in junior high, but never went beyond three. At Yale I saw my first serious jugglers, and within a year I was working on all the hard stuff. I got mononeucleosis my freshman year at Yale and had to go home. When I was well enough I started to take some classes at Bowdoin, but I was just having too much fun juggling to go back.

 

It was an intensely frustrating time for me. I wasn't making the progress I wanted on the juggling and wasn't making progress on a degree, either. I decided I had to quit one or the other, so I pretty much just walked away from math and college. Math was the only thing I did for the first 18 years of my life, it just came naturally. I was headed for a life as a math professor, but decided after I learned juggling that math wasn't how I wanted to spend my  time. What I wanted to do when I got up in the morning was - and still is - juggle. My parents were a bit reluctant at first, but I'm fortunate they're broadminded enough to support it rather than denying it.