JW-vol49no2-p90

Petite LOTTIE BRUNN Stands Tall as Fastest Female in Past Half-Century

by Cindy Marvell

Ask anyone who knows about the art of tossing clubs, rings or balls into the air - and keeping them there elegantly - and chances are you will hear homage paid to Lottie Brunn.

Ms. Brunn has not performed since the mid-1980's, but even now, at 71, she looks as if all she needs is a pair of spiked heels (in fact, she still wears them), some fishnet stockings and a sequined leotard to come theatrically alive in the spotlight of the center ring.

From her first professional engagement as a teenager in her native Germany through a career with the Ringling show and on the nightclub circuit, Ms. Brunn became known for speed (her billing: "the world's fastest female juggler"), first in tandem with her older brother, Francis, and then later as a solo act.

How she came to live quietly in a trailer park in Bergen County, New Jersey, almost 40 years ago is merely the function of a life spent on the road: she had traveled to New York City in 1959 to appear on "The Ed Sullivan Show" and needed a place to park. There were other performers in the park then, she said and trailer life was always part of being peripatetic - if not trailers, then hotels, but rarely apartments or houses. Circus performers and vaudevillians often worked 11 months a year, seven days a week, two or three shows a day.

I first met Ms. Brunn at a juggling club in Hackensack, where she shook my hand with a grip of steel and insisted on watching me practice. ("It has to have a sequence, a meaning," she said. "It has to build to a finish.")

But I had heard about her years before, when I was 14, an aspiring juggler toting balls, clubs and rings to Falling Debris, a juggling club I belonged to in Manhattan. Ms. Brunn's picture was on the cover of Jugglers World magazine. Wearing a black lace-covered leotard, with a headpiece cradling a ball balanced on her forehead and a ball in each hand, she seemed undaunted by the spectacle of two more balls hovering impossibly out or her reach.

She looked quite different from the jugglers I practiced with, a crew my mother described as "a bunch of 26-year-old guys in undershirts." My father, a physicist, had learned three balls as a child for reasons nobody could remember; my aunt had taken juggling breaks while working on her doctorate. I had high hopes of forming a trio with my younger sister and brother and performing in my high school cabaret.