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Juggler's Act Is On Fire

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By TOM JACKSON

tjackson@tampatrib.com

Published: February 20, 2009

DADE CITY - The thing about the Back Porch Stage, a narrow patch of unpaved possibility between Higgins Hall and Clayton Auditorium - the unfortunate thing, really - is that you pretty much have to be going there to get there.

It's not like county fair visitors stagger out of the Scrambler, stumble a few steps to their right and, voila, there they are. Or that, while preparing to toss darts at eggplant-shaped balloons for fame and prizes, the dazzling lights of showtime activity catch the contestants' eyes.

Instead, the Back Porch Stage either rewards with cheery serendipity the determined fairgrounds wanderer, or it requires stopping to ask for directions. And we declare this circumstance to be unfortunate because appearing there - for One! Week! Only! - is not merely Tuey Wilson, comic stunt juggler. It is Tuey Wilson, the sideshow showoff's showoff, teasing gravity, playing with fire, cracking wise and spreading guffawing fun like a virus.

Wilson was born "Steven, with a V," but nicknamed - for reasons that escaped family documentation - "Tuey" by his older brothers shortly after his birth in Faribault, Minn., an hour south of the Twin Cities, 46 years ago. Today, he is 69 inches of fat-free Viking hot-dog: lean, blond, blue-eyed and shot through with a sense of daring that would mesmerize Leif Ericson.

Oh, yeah, sure Ericson sailed the north Atlantic at a time when seafarers made sacrifices to moody gods and were watchful for ocean-going dragons. But did he ever try it perched atop a free-standing 7-foot aluminum ladder while wearing the Flaming Beanie of Death? Well, did he?

Wilson does, three times a day, while juggling fire batons - and that, arguably, isn't even his best stunt.

Got A Light?

This leads us back to the inadequacies of the Back Porch Stage, which, though agreeably intimate, is just barely large enough to accommodate Wilson's torchlight trilogy - as the scorch mark in the corrugated steel roof attests - to say nothing of the feat that reads like something out of a Houdini nightmare: Performing the entire blazing finale while walking a tightrope en flambe.

Wilson reserves this singular comic stunt juggling conflagration for the open-air venues afforded by the several Renaissance festivals that recruit his services each year. Otherwise, Pasco County Fair audiences get his 30 best minutes, 30 minutes featuring furiously spinning balls - as many as six at a time - looping hoops, Nerf rockets, acrobatics and comedic banter, punctuated by poses evoking classic sculpture from Atlas to "The Discus Thrower" to the Heisman Trophy.

At the risk of stealing - for instructional purposes only - a terrific line: "As ever, kids, don't try this at home. ... Oh, who am I kidding? Of course you should try this at home. That's where I learned it. You're not getting this stuff in school."

Self-Taught Authority

Believe it. Although camaraderie exists among jugglers (they even have conventions), most exhibit-worthy skills are largely self-taught. By the time Wilson emerged from high school, he'd determined that juggling on stage was the career for him.

"No sense wasting my dad's money for four years of college," Wilson says. In 1981 - notably, the first year of the Reagan administration and the rebirth of self-reliant entrepreneurism - Wilson struck a blow for unconventional sole proprietorship.

Years later, having become a fixture in the upper Midwest festival scene, stage-struck friends who sometimes shared billings, if not his enthusiasm, described him thusly: "We juggle a little, so we can get on stage and act; you act a little so you can get on stage and juggle."

Guilty, Wilson says. "I love to show off what I can do better than anybody else. Talking to the audience, that's just a way to invite them in, to share, so they'll stick around to see what I can do."

For going on nine years now, nearly one-third of his professional career, he has done what he does with such engaging, eye-goggling expertise that he does nothing else. Once upon a time, he supplemented his income reading meters for the local electric utility, working for his brother's construction company or coaching an Alpine ski-racing team. No longer. He's not just a stunt juggler; he's a stunt-juggling success.

Which also means that his wife, Robin, whom he met while taking a sign-language class, doesn't work. Not that there's anything wrong with career women, he hastens to add. But Mrs. Comic Stunt Juggler has career enough home-schooling their daughters, Molly, 12, and Emily, 9, neither of whom has so far displayed their father's appetite for high-risk stagecraft.

Just don't call yourself a successful performance artist if you're relying on someone else's income to make ends meet, Wilson says. After all, the best ones have always operated without a net.

These days, success makes Wilson a traveling man. His Pasco stop marks the start of a five-week tour that will take him through Atlanta and across to Oklahoma in a 2003 Dodge Caravan that will have clicked up close to 145,000 miles by the time he gets home. After that, he's open to suggestion, invitation, booking or bar mitzvah. "When the economy gets tough," Wilson observes, "entertainment is the first to go."

This is much of why he spends his off-hours working on "Plan B, or maybe Plan A-2" - an Internet marketing start-up, the details of which are as hush-hush as its originator is hey-look-me-over.

For the moment, however, he's the showboat you're happy you stumbled across, the coolest act with the hottest finish at the 62nd Heart of Florida Fair. Ask for directions. You'll be glad you did.

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

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