Power of the pyramid?

Power of the Pyramid: Under the Bubble Tower at Phoenix Pride 2005

On numerous occasions I’ve noticed folks gathering under the Bubble Tower to meet up,

even when they are not chasing bubbles!

Since the Bubble Tower is nearly silent in operation it becomes a welcome spot to gather.

Use the Bubble Tower as a center piece, gate way, or activity feature, and be prepared to enjoy the results.

The gathering place

COW Bubble Tower back rest at the Peoples Fair

No, I prefer to stalk them.

Like a giant jungle cat, or your tabby, I am always wary, alert to opportunities. Searching, seeking, observing.  On
the look out.  The ebb, the flow of the jungle’s – er, festival’s- occupants. The trails to and from the watering
hole, the buffet line, where my prey congregates. Places of concealment, possible distractions, dangers, impediments to
my quest.

For I am hungry.  Deeply, urgently, hungry – for the chase! For the best tasting hot dog, desert, ice cream cone, funnel
cake, pop corn or brisket, any where, any time, is the one you track down and stalk yourself!

Ah, look!  Over there:  FOOD! a funnel cake on a plate!  An ice cream cone, and a burrito!
Observe:    Quick, which opportunity is the best: the prey borne by the darting child, the athletic looking youth, or the lumbering, distracted adult?

Choices matter.  If I pick the wrong one, the chase will be too  soon over.  Ah, the child spots my cleverly here to
fore concealed out sized telescopic fork.  I put my finger to my lips, make eye contact, and gesture, ever so slightly
to her brother’s funnel cake.  She understands.  She consents to play along.  The drama begins!

Crouching like an invisible nine foot tall house cat, silently- surely, only I can hear the bells tinkling on my
feet- I begin the stalk.  Deftly keeping in his shadow, out of his peripheral vision, I pursue, hovering, dodging,
twisting, even skipping as needed, I remain concealed.  My near two foot long feet do me no favors, but I am adept.
Occasionally bringing my fore finger to my lips, I signal my audience for cooperation.  For we are all part of this drama
of life and death!

I close in.  My stomach is hungry.  I rub, my hand circling. My mouth involuntarily is opening and closing, as if taking
bites of the funnel cake.  My senses real: the sweet, greasy, aromatic funnel cake calls to me.  My self
discipline crumbles, I moan.

I am discovered!

Graciously he offers me some cake.  A piece, perhaps is all he has in mind.  Perhaps even a generous piece.

Instead I deftly take the entire plate from him. I smile. I thank him profusely, over and over again for his generosity,
his understanding.  Breaking off a small bite of cake, I offer it to him.  He takes it, swallows, perhaps in
confusion and realization: The trickster clown has taken advantage of his generosity and trusting nature!

I explain the culinary facts of life to him:  The best tasting treat is the one you stalk yourself!  He smiles.
Laughs even.  I return his funnel cake to him, after perhaps reserving a bit for myself.  For even the clown deserves a
reward for a job well done!

I look about.  Ah, over there . . .

Felix – the Bubble Wright , a friend of mine in Delaware,  was just published in Renaissance Magazine under his non de plume Torrey Seifenblase, an article titled Renaissance Bubble Machine.  “Imagine that Leonardo da Vinci designed a bubble machine . . . .”
He mentions that Peiter Bruegel the Elder did a painting in 1560 entitled “Children’s Games” that showed a lad blowing bubbles.  Felix takes his Renaissance Bubble Machine to Ren Faires on the east coast.  His machine builds on an Amish goat cart and is quite entertaining!

There are a number of events where Red, White, and Blue are appropriate, so I thought I would put together some photos for you.  Custom designs welcomed.

Red, blue and silver Giant Parade Puppet

Stretch riding his Stilt Bike

Some more Sky Dancing, and an early Giant Parade Puppet.

In the opening segment, I am “conducting” the CSO at the Lone Tree summer concert series.   The sod was pretty soft from rain, and I kept sinking into the sod!   Keeping ahead of the kids was a real challenge, but it all worked out.  Judge for your selves.

Sky Dancing with Stretch the nine foot clown

Click here to view the embedded video.

Chasing away west nile mosquitoes at Flat Iron Crossing! Stretch the nine foot cowboy

Not in the traditional sense.  I do manipulate objects, but not balls and clubs.  I spin a little poi, or rather I spin
MEGA poi, a little.  Best when performed to music, and also very effective for traffic flagging at car lots and the like.

The most dramatic example of object manipulation that I practice is what I call Sky Painting or Sky Dancing.

Stretch paints the sky in Boulder City, NV - photo credit Amstutz

I manipulate – what an inadequate term – while on stilts, equipped with a 20 foot long “fishing pole” to which is
attached a stroboscopic ribbon up to 60 feet long.

Beset, nay, near drunk with music, I dance with my pole and ribbon.  This is an interactive performance, mind you.  The ribbon caresses the sky, and my audience: a cheek here, a shoulder there, a small hand.  With little or no
encouragement, children – and adults- reach – to reach, grasp and release the flowing colors.

The breeze is my friend, enabling spirals, figure eights, circles and more.  The wind teases me as I dance over the
yielding ground.  Near and far, left to right, forward to caress my , yes my audience. For they are mine.  The fourth
wall?  What wall? Backwards, dancing to prepare for my next attack, my dance, dare I say, love, covers the stage.  One
performer covering a circus tent of volume, air and space, emotion and imagination. The colors flow, blend, separate,
rejoin as the speed and patters change.  My audience, seated, leans in to experience all the better. Faces up
turned, some in joy, others in dumbfounded amazement.  I am exhausted.  The band continues, I continue, the kids are
eternal in their quest for the ribbon. I am determined to conduct the music to its finish.

Finally, the music is concluded.  Drenched with sweat, my hair, hat, shirt, waist,  soaked, saturated,  I turn to face
the crowd.  Silence, more silence – I bow, the applause begins.  The band leader takes the mic, and I hear: “well,
we can’t compete with that”.

I am shocked.  Competition ?  No, not that.  But I understand.  You take a risk when you do something that is
outside of your audience’s vocabulary.  “he was a good juggler” is how you compliment a juggler.  But how do you
compliment the nearly indescribable?

Later I hear “hypnotic”, “mesmerizing”. Soon, soon please, I hope to hear “spiritual”.

Chasing away west nile mosquitoes at Flat Iron Crossing! Stretch the nine foot cowboy

Sky Dancing Explanation
   This Sky Dancing essay describes two 2002 performances at the Lone Tree, Colorado concert in the park program.  Marilyn told me that folks talked for weeks about my “conducting” the CSO in their performance of the Blue Danube.

It took about two years of on again, off again practice to develop enough muscle memory to make me happy with it. Not every performance is a peak performance of course, but those two that I write of, they were out standing. It was the jazz band, not the CSO leader, that made the “compete” comment.

Sufficient space, and condition and direction of the wind is critical. I also prefer a seated audience, gives me more
volume to move the ribbon in. Firm, level, ground is preferred to the rain soaked sod that was omni present at
the CSO performance.

And of course a degree of physical conditioning is helpful! The 2002 Cherry Creek Arts festival performance came at the end of a very long and active day.  The heat was considerable, and my “dance floor” exceeded the width of the
entire stage: 60 feet or so.  The first challenge was finding the rhythm in the Latin Jazz composition.  And then
interpreting that music in a very physical way, across the entire width of the stage.

The choice of music is a factor as well. Some stuff I can’t do a thing with. I’m pretty much moving in half time with my
feet and in full time with the ribbon . . . at least I think that is what happening! I prefer a piece I am familiar with,
that way I can anticipate a little better. What usually happens, I show up and then find out what the music is. Then
I either do it or not, no practice, just cold. Makes for an interesting challenge.

I wonder if Sky Dancing would fit in a circle (busking) act some how, but haven’t the faintest clue how to string all my
bits and pieces into a show. Some day I hope to figure it out.

Sky Painting at the Castle Rock Library grand opening.

Dear fellow stilt walkers,

Know your equipment!

Loosened stilt-skate screws may well have led to George Sommerdorf’s  death.

http://www.lifesaving.com/general-interest/news/ice-skater-presumed-dead-donner-lake

http://skating.zachariahs.com/skatingforums-onice/www.skatingforums.com/archive/index.php/t-22731.html

•  1/31/07  *Equipment failure leads to death of stilt skater
  *Sacramento, CA :  George Sommerdorf, 50, drowns while stilt skating on Lake Donnerhttp://www.news10.net/storyfull2.aspx?storyid=23968

George’s daughter,  Brooke Sommerdorf wrote me:

“My dad was a very enthusiastic skater and took it to a new level when he added stilts to his ice skates. He died in 2007 when his fall on his stilts on Donner lake broke the ice underneath him and he drowned.

He was very good on his stilt skates, you should see the video” :
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=5806566
and the other video (which is the best one )is at:
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=5806684
as you can tell he’d been doing this for a long time.              

Slipping or tripping.

On any surface.  With any kind of stilt.  In my experience the Bigfoot soling material sticks the best and is very hard wearing.  I do jumping jacks and dance with mine, as well as miles at a time.  But there WAS that one inch long piece of rotten banana on my 1999 marathon stilt walk that nearly taught me the splits!  I added an extra foot to my stride
with that banana!

Another since retired circus performer broke his pelvis doing the splits the hard way. I’m told it was excruciating.  And that was just the sound! He was on VERY tall stilts.

Pushing the limits.  If you set out to do flips, cross Niagara Falls on stilts on a high wire,
(yes, it has been done, see my history page,  a flight of stairs, a grassy bank, an escalator, or ? be prepared to fail a few times before succeeding.

Diminished capacity.  Fatigue, hunger, alcohol, medical.  be aware, be careful.  That ceiling fan could ruin your whole evening!

Out of the ordinary. Slips Happen

One slip and four circus stilt performers tumble from on high.  Ouch!

3-4-5 kids act together to distract the wrangler and deliberately trip the stilt walking clown.  Results in a broken knee cap.

At a stadium event the crowd gets very unruly and starts climbing the barriers to rush the stilt performers
and his partner.  Partner holds them back with his bull whip.

Transmission oil leak during the spec left a wonderful clown with a permanently frozen wrist.

Master Clown Frosty Little writes of his days with the RBBB circus and their tall stilt performers.  Peg stilts five to
14 feet tall. Needless to say, broken arms, wrists, shoulders and hips result from  seemingly minor incidents.  Someone
feeds a horse a carrot. A small piece dribbles unseen, becoming a launch pad for the unwary stilt performer.

I’m remembering the time I was an “Ostrich jockey”.  The costume was made with real ostrich feathers that had been washed, but not dyed.  As I was walking to my car from an outdoor festival I was “mugged”!  By four, that’s right four, belgium sheep dogs.  A woman was walking her beautiful and well behaved dogs, two to a leash, when they, (the dogs, not the woman) got a whiff of the feathers.  They dragged her over to me, and proceeded to sniff the “ostrich”.
They gave me a real going over, gently jumping up, putting both front paws on my legs and stilts to get get a better sniff!

Stretch as an ostrich jockey - ride on costume at the Ostrich Festival in Castle Rock, CO

Stretch the Ostrich Jockey

Eventually the curious canines were satisfied, and went their way.  Do they still sell smelling salts?  I could have used some !

Walking back from the ball drop one New Year’s eve, two teens some distance in BACK of me start chasing each other.  I happened to be in the way!  Nothing malicious, but one second I was upright, a split second later I was sitting on the ground.  Six months later I felt fine again!

Three  drunks decide to run between my legs . . . from behind!   Was on my tall stilts, (43 inches) fighting a strong gusting wind.  Scared me half to death, but no damage done.

And  at a Habitat for Humanity out door screening of the Wizard of OZ, a dog, off leash casually, with NO warning, sauntered over and hiked his leg and PEED on me!!!!

Nice thing about suplex nylon, it pretty much rolled right off.  I went ahead and laundered that night anyway!

Conditioning, mental and physical.

The more experience and practice the better is all I can say.  Even if you have
to get up and start circling the park at 5 am as I have, you’ll be the better for it.  How else are you going to learn that
you can bluff a pit bull?

How to make a variety of walking stilts:

• Follow these links to make your own stilts!!!
• “How To” Stilt plans
  http://kneehigh.va.com.au/stilt.gif
  http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~rfs1/juggle/stilts.html 
• http://www.inquiry.net/images/C_ohb081.gif
• http://dangerouslyfun.com/stilts
• http://boyslife.org/hobbies-projects/projects/636/easy-to-make-stilts/
• http://www.stiltman.com/html/stilt_plans.html
• http://www.jerrybuilt.com/stilts.htm
• http://pages.areaguides.com/ubuild/Stilts.htm
  

• This next one is in French!
• http://lebaronperche.free.fr/echasses.htm

An interesting design using joist hangers.

                                                                   

 

         Barbados Stilt Design – Welded square steel with replaceable round wood poles                                                             
Asian Stilts design (screen captures from “Duty Free TV” on G4TV.com )
   

• http://poweriser.tribe.net/
• Big Cat Hunting Stilts
• Tall Characters Unlimited-
• “How To” Stilt plans

Many thanks to NV Energy for sponsoring the solar powered Bubble Tower at the Lakes Festival of Lights presented at the Lakes at West Sahara in Las Vegas!

This was a last minute booking, and we scrambled to present the Bubble Tower in Las Vegas on the same day that

Stretch the Giant Candy Cane, Quak the holiday Penguin, Giant Parade Puppet, menorah and Dancing Christmas Trees

performed in  the Tulsa Holiday Parade in the historic Blue Dome District in Downtown Tulsa.

I heard the kids LOVED the Bubble Tower – I could hear them screaming in delight when I called Jerry to see how he was doing!  THANK YOU Greg Toussaint, President of the Lakes Association.  You were terrific to work with in getting this organized at the last minute, and securing NV Energy as a sponsor.

What a crowd! The world's biggest bubble toy is a hit!

“We had the largest crowd ever… somewhere over 10,000 people.  The Bubble Tower was the hit of the Festival.  The kids just loved it.

The (sponsors) NBC News3 team was happy and so was NV Energy.  We hope to do it again next year.
Jerry did a great job.  Please thank him again for me.”

“The Bubble Tower was a tremendous success.”

Greg Toussaint, Pres. The Lakes Association

The Lakes Festival of Lights, Las Vegas, NV
http://www.lakesassociation.com/festival/

Bubbles! I want bubbles!

“Hi Bill:

It was a big hit with everyone except the car show participants.  The bubbles made their way to some of the cars and left a white residue behind on the cars.  We will know for next time to locate it accordingly.

It was great to see the kids having so much fun with something that seems so simple.  We should all take notes from the kids on that.    . . . I will be sure to let everyone know what a popular feature it was at the event.  Thank you for introducing us to such a fun thing.”

Audrie Dodge, liaison

Councilman Steve Wolfson, Ward 2