LOL is the team of middle school jugglers I train each year at Windham Christian Academy.  With school starting up again a few weeks ago, LOL is up and running strong.  The fact that 9 of my eighth graders were in LOL last year, and they are all accomplished jugglers set us up for a strong start.  The new students are learning quickly, too, and we had our first show of the year last weekend.

Each September, the small town of Cornish, Maine has an apple festival in their village green.  This year we were invited to be part of it.  I've performed there before, but not in quite some time.  This time, LOL was asked to do 'walk around' juggling followed by a 30 minute show.  This was perfect, because we have only been in school three weeks, so 30 minutes is all the material we had ready.  The walk around was a lot of fun.  A handful of new students who have not mastered juggling yet were taught to make balloon animals that they gave out to bystanders who stopped to watch the more experienced kids as they juggled torches, fire devil sticks, machetes, as well as the more traditional props of clubs, diabolos and balls. 

While they were doing this under the supervision of my new assistant, Kirsten, it allowed me to set up the show.  We performed on a side street that was closed off for the festival, and a friendly neighbor allowed us to spill over onto her lawn.  At 2:15, we began as scheduled.  Now, this was a very challenging venue:  There was a band playing to our left, an apple pie auction on our right, people walking through the stage area, and the street we were on was a slight hill.  This last factor made the balance board very hard to perform.

Nonetheless, the kids did quite well.  Adam was perfect as he juggled apples while eating them.  All seven machete jugglers were flawless in our machete medley.  Veronica mastered three tricks with the spinning plate in only two days of practice and Caleb did a very smooth job with the shackles escape. 

One of the highlights of the day for me was meeting up with people I haven't seen in years.  You see, Cornish is the town where I taught before taking my current job in Windham, so I ran into three former students, including Keshia who will be a bride's maid in our daughter, Naomi's, wedding.  And all throughout the show a lady was standing in the center of the audience.  Leanne Pooler was a coworker of mine back in my Cornish days, and she saw, as she said, "All the juggling and the white hair" and knew it must be me with my class.  We caught up briefly after the show.

Then we packed up our props - the student officers did a great job leading the work teams in this task - and we headed home, pleased with a solid first show as this year's addition of LOL.