Loon Magic

BY DAVE MEDARIS - Isthmus

The cry of the loon has been described as laugh like.

A second haunting cry is associated with Truly Remarkable Loon, Madison's foremost juggler. It sounds like this: "Higher, higher!"

Loon-lean, tan, dressed in trademark purple - will launch a "diabolo," an hourglass-shaped object, from a string controlled by wands attached at either end. The diabolo rises high into the air, higher than the last time, as if riding a glass elevator, then descends and alights once again on the string.

Applause follows gasps - applause like no north-woods loon has ever heard. And the cry comes again, a chorus from adults and children alike: "Higher, higher."

Truly Remarkable Loon first shoots the audience an exasperated "oh sure" look, then smiles and obliges.

As a man who makes his living juggling to his own subversive banter, Loon is the kind of bird that doesn't fly in our flock. He sets his own hours, he doesn't have to wear a dark suit in August, He can grow his dark blond hair down to his waist if he wants to, and he still gets to live in a nice east side house with a nice car in the driveway.

Still, a juggler's life is not effortless as it looks. Juggling for a living means making phone calls, setting up gigs at schools and corporate parties, keeping 40 copies of his video in the mail to potential clients, sending out contracts. And practice. Lots of practice. After 13 years of paying his dues, Loon can still spend hundreds of hours learning a new routine.

It's indicative of juggling's popularity that Loon makes a living without passing the hat. Though many people still think of him as a street performer, he really isn't anymore. How long has it been since a juggling act's appearance on Ed Sullivan depended on Topo Gigio not running over? Now the Flying Karamazov Brothers - whose influence Loon eagerly acknowledges - can fill the Civic Center. Jugglers are organized into the International Jugglers' Association and have their own magazine, Juggler's World. And Madison has itself has a growing fraternity of jugglers.

Truly Remarkable Loon has benefited from juggling's new found acceptance, but it's still taken him years of hard work to establish a career based on Loon Magic.

THROWING THINGS UP

What makes professional juggling especially challenging for Loon is that he's shy. Or so he claims.

Even Loon admits he liked drawing attention to himself from an early age.

His parents came to America from East Germany. Loon was originally named Stefan, was born two years later, in 1956, the middle of Fritz and Ingeborg Albert's five kids. At Madison's Memorial High School Loon was already adept at standing out.

After high school Loon was peripatetic. He never seriously considered college. At one point he lived for half a year in Phillips, Wis., with two people who juggled every day. he didn't take the hint. It wasn't until he bumped into an old high school buddy at a party hosted by local cultural footnote Uncle Vinty, and his friend went out in the yard after midnight to juggle his flaming torches, that Loon's imagination was set aflame.

Loon was migrating to Mexico that winter when, by chance, he ran into the same juggling pal in Taos. It was from him that Loon learned his first juggling patterns.

" I was really intrigued with the flaming torches, though I did start with three balls," Loon recalls. "Real fast I made some juggling sticks or rudimentary clubs, and shortly after I'd learned how to juggle them I attached wicks to them and fired those babies up. Just about burned myself up the first couple times."

In Mexico, between shifts as a tourist, Loon practiced passionately: "For the next two years, I'd spend six or eight hours a day throwing stuff around."

Much of that practice time was spent with Martin Jelenc, Loon's longtime partner in the First Church of Fun Juggling Company Show. Loon met Jelenc in his senior year of high school, but they didn't start juggling together until much later. Their first show was at Madison's 1979 Equinox Festival. Says Loon, "It was very crude."

PASSING THE HAT

Soon after, the idea of actually being compensated for his talents first nudged its way into Loon's brain. One Saturday at the Farmer's Market, he was part of an audience watching two jugglers who called themselves the Wimbledon Brothers. Their act revolved around tennis. "It astounded me," Loon recalls. "Especially when they stayed at our house and I saw how much money they made from a couple brief performances."

On a trip to Key West, Fla. in 1980 Loon and Martin polished their act, working up new routines all day before taking part in Key West's sunset-watching ritual. Loon wore a perpetual tan, and the salt air started to etch crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes.

"The first time we did an actual performance down there and passed the hat, we got 38 cents,' Loon says. "I remember thinking, 'This isn't really going to work out, is it?' But we persisted. It was a great place to learn about doing street performances, because there were a lot of street performers there-a lot of juggling acts, musicians, magicians, all kinds of stuff. You could see what worked for them, get concepts and incorporate them into your performance. It was really a do-or-die situation, because if you didn't have a good show, people would just walk 20 feet over and might see someone juggling flaming hoops."

Back home, Loon's juggling didn't thrill his skeptical father, though his mother was supportive from the beginning. Fritz Albert says, "I originally thought it comes and goes. It was very fashionable at that time." First Loon's persistence, then his success, won over his father, and today Fritz is unreservedly proud of his son.

In 1981 Martin and Loon became fixtures at the Farmer's Market and elsewhere around town and around the state. The partnership thrived; the show's format changed little but each performance was different, depending on improvisation and the exploitation of news events in their dialog.

They continued to draw large appreciative audiences until the spring of '86 when Martin dropped his clubs and bought a piece of land near Mount Vernon. He farms there, and does woodworking.

LITTLE REMARKS

So how much does a juggler earn? Can you pay the rent with money made by spinning plates? "It's not a killing but it's a living," Loon says, "I haven't had a real job for probably five or six years now.

He's traded the Farmer's Market gig for bookings at school shows in Wisconsin and northern Illinois, at libraries and business conventions. Shows are booked four, six, eight months in advance.

There are a couple different Loon shows, each suited to a different audience. He's sillier for kids, and, he says, "Of course I don't do any blue material in a children's show. Adults seem to like a certain amount of that, depending on their level of intoxication." For mixed shows, Loon uses malapropisms that amuse kids by their sound but whose meanings pass over their heads and clobber adults like a wayward club.

Loon is modest about his place in the juggling food chain. He defines himself as a comedy juggler, not a technical juggler. He returns from conventions with stories of being dazzled by a hot Russian juggler, or a prodigy, or a juggler who can keep a shower of seven clubs aloft. Still, his proficiency with two diabolos makes it look as if he's flicked off the gravity switch, and most of the things he can do with a half-dozen shaker cups are ill-advised for the helmetless.

"Juggling is all throwing," Loon says. "if you make perfect throws, you don't have to worry about the catches.

Loon uses his juggling for punctuation for his irreverent rap. "He loves to make little remarks," says his father. Remarks about the likes of J. Danforth Quayle, the space shuttle, junk food. And he can make the corniest visual puns work.

Which comes first, the juggle or the gag? "I find stuff I like to juggle, then I find jokes to go along with the items," Loon says.

Thus the famous, cautionary lunch juggle, in which Loon juggles a tomato and two Hostess Sno-Balls, trying to avoid biting into the confections of corn syrup and mutant BHT with each toss, while nibbling on the vitamin-C-rich tomato. It's comedy juggling that requires a bib and a drop cloth.

NO MONEY, NO FUNNY

Loon often picks up ideas from other jugglers. After 13 years of throwing things around, he can see another juggler do something, register it and, if it's within his physical abilities, replicate the feat. "At first , I could see somebody do something, but I'd have to ask them, have them explain it many times, and then I might be able to crudely do it," Loon says.

His style, though, is uniquely loony.

It begins with the predominant color, purple. Loon, a self-described "accomplished seamster," does many of his own clothes. There are purple knickers and socks, a purple tie-dyed T-shirt, a purple beret. His juggling clubs are purple with white rubber trim - custom-made by a Santa Cruz firm called Renegades.

Even his house is purple.

Okay, so he doesn't always wear his purple juggling formals around the house. At home, he pads around in bare feet, running shorts and a Loon Magic T-shirt. But he never takes off his name. His mother calls him Truly Remarkable (with pride and a strong German accent), but you can call him Loon. So can the people who cash his checks. So can the travel agent that booked his recent flight to Baltimore for a jugglers' convention-the name was right there on the ticket. Still skeptical? Rifle his wallet.

His IRA isn't in the name of Truly Remarkable Loon, though, because he doesn't have one. "I've thought about it," Loon says, "but I always think of Karl Wallenda-he's my personal hero in that department." (Wallenda, the patriarch of a family high-wire act, fell to his death a decade ago from a wire strung between two buildings.)

For all his irreverence, Loon does take his profession seriously. "I couldn't do this if it didn't pay, so that's one thing I'm pretty serious about," he says. "I've got strict policies. I get calls all the time to do benefits. Or people can't believe I do this for a living, so they'll assume I'll do it for free.

"I try to stick to my policy of no money, no funny."

And he's serious about the charge he gets from making his audience laugh. "I often have that feeling that I killed them. I like that feeling," says Loon. "I come home and think about a show and people ask me how it went and I say, well, I had to stop so they could breathe."