From then on, whether with Martin or not, where there was a crowd, there was Loon.

 

"Once I started juggling I was a real addict. My first two years of juggling I recall I would regularly juggle six or eight hours a day, even if I had a job. It caused certain problems... I never went anywhere without my juggling clubs, I always had them."

 

Loon and Martin Jellenc both took to juggling every chance they had. With the loosely organized Madison Juggling Club and on their own at the Library Mall at the University of Wisconsin, sometimes until one or two in the morning. The Madison Juggling Club met Sundays at the Student :Union. As is the case with so many wrongly maligned and misunderstood juggling groups, there were some problems.

 

Loon was interviewed in the very place he used to juggle at the Union, a lounge area known as the "pit." "We got thrown out of here quite regularly. I'd try to hit the glass roof with my diabolo. This was a great juggling room - carpeted floor, push all the furniture out of the way and if any people were here we'd juggle clubs next to them until they got terrified and left."

 

The Library Mall was a bit friendlier, and he and Martin practiced there long into the night under electric yellow lights. The practice was purely for their own entertainment until an act known as the Wimbledon Brothers came to the Madison Farmer's Market. The Wimbledon Brothers had an act oriented around tennis - tennis clothes, passing eight rackets, and the like. After performing at the Farmer's Market, the Brothers performed at the Library Mall just as Martin and Loon had for the past year, with one difference: at the end, they passed the hat. Loon invited them to stay at his place that night and watched in amazement as they counted the hat. "I said, 'I can do a show almost that good, and I've been on that corner for years.'''

 

So starting with the Equinox Festival, the juggling team of Martin and Loon began performing. They weren't limited to Madison. Like certain birds, they were smarter than the average Wisconsin native and headed south for the winters, places like San Francisco, Hawaii, Taos, or Key West, where Martin was familiar with the street performing scene. It was in Key West that they began making contact with the professional juggling community.

 

People like Locomotion Vaudeville, Magical Mystical Michael, Will Soto, and especially Waldo helped Loon hone his skills for dealing with a street crowd. "We'd practice on the beach all day, then go down to Mallory Square in the evening. We'd either watch some other street performers work or we'd do a show of our own, go back to the van, discuss what was wrong with the show, practice all day the next day, and then go and do another show that night. Key West was a wonderful place to develop a show because you had a new audience every night. You could do a show seven nights a week there. There were other acts you could watch and learn from, or that would watch you and give you feedback."

 

The duo quickly developed a style and flair for audiences that booked them all over the country. In the Bay area they worked Pier 39 and were banned from the Cannery, a shopping mall, because their audiences were cheering too loudly. Local merchants felt that customers should be there to shop, not to be entertained.

 

In Hawaii one year they were part of a "hula show" and befriended a fire-breathing, stiltwalking Canadian by the name of Guy Laliberte, who is now directing La Cirque du Soleil. Guy sponsored a street performer's festival every year with the rest of his stiltwalking troupe and invited Martin and Loon to join him in Quebec City in 1984 and again in 1985. In the second year, after the festival was over, just before they were about to leave, Guy phoned them with another booking, at a cabaret that had just opened in Lac St. Jean, about a day's travel north. After traveling through the night, they finally managed to track down not only the manager but also a translator, since this was French-speaking Quebec and neither Martin nor Loon knew one lick of French. The manager was sorry, but the Charlie Chaplin Club, where they'd been booked, had been closed by the building inspectors two days ago. However, there was another club across from the Chaplin Club with a variety of acts, and they could perform there instead.