JugglingSubculture.com

Notice the title of this post is a command and not a question. Every good juggler needs a rola bola to play with. Rolla bollas are fun, they are challenging, they add another dimension to your juggling skills, and they are a crowd-thrilling addition to any show.

If you’re curious where to get one for yourself. May I suggest the following:

• For the board: Dube makes the best. It’s a little pricey but if you don’t want to spend time making your own this is definitely the way to go. Dube’s rola bola is very well constructed and has great grip features that will keep you from slipping off the board.
• For the roller: I really like the rola bola tube that you can get from Serious Juggling. For $9 it’s a much bigger and stronger pipe than you get with your Dube rola bola.

If you get really good on your rola bola, and you find some leather pants, you could be like this guy:

We’ve done a little design upgrade here at JugglingSubculture.com. My tech buddy Chris helped me customize this template with the header you see at the top of the page. It features a broken roof tile from my house and my trusty 95MM Renegade clubs. Hope you enjoy it. Let me know what you think.

Perry Romanowski claims to be Just Your Average Joggler; meaning he likes to combine his love for juggling and running into the niche sport known as joggling. He runs small distances, competes in joggling competitions at the IJA conventions, and even runs marathons while juggling. Recently he ended a streak of joggling over one mile every day for 444 days.

He might think of himself as “just your average joggler” but in my book that makes him an above average juggler. He takes his sport very seriously and maintains the best joggling blog on the Internet, touching on a variety of topics about running, juggling, joggling, and more.

The juggling subculture needs more enthusiasts like Perry Romanowski and we definitely need more blogs like his.

One way to get juggling a more respected seat at the entertainment table is to bring back vaudeville. People are so enamored with TV and movies they forget how captivating live entertainment can be. We jugglers should take over the small theaters around the world, invite some other acts to join us, and start a modern vaudeville revolution.

Here are some jugglers in a vaudeville style act from around 1940. I dig their suits.

Why aren’t there any jugglers headlining in Vegas?

Why don’t average people know the name of any professional jugglers?

Why hasn’t there ever been a feature film about a juggler?

Why hasn’t a juggler ever won America’s Got Talent?

Why are there only a handful of juggling blogs and most of them rarely updated?

Why is a cruise ship job, the highest gig many jugglers aspire to?

The juggling subculture has a ton of talented, entertaining, hard-working, skilled performers; why don’t normal people know who they are?

What are we going to do about it?

Vova Galchenko is a giant in the juggling subculture. He (and his sister Olga) have been all over the WJF competitions and have some great videos on YouTube.

Here’s a great profile written about Vova in Play, the New York Times online sports magazine.

It’s always interesting when a non-juggler writes about a juggler. It’s clear that this reporter “gets it” when it comes to the skill, the passion, the dedication, and the hard work that goes into juggling.

My dad taught me and my brothers how to juggle when we were in elementary school. He could do a decent 3 ball cascade and thought it was a good learning experience for 3 growing boys. He probably never thought that a few years down the road I’d be a performing juggler. Now I’m trying to get him to learn three clubs so we can pass. It’s fun watching him learn and go through the same frustrations and triumphs that I went through when he taught me the basic stuff. Oh how the tables have turned!

Here’s one juggler teaching her Dad how to juggle. Maybe it will inspire you to teach your dad some new tricks. Happy Father’s Day!

Apparently The Hoff has issues with jugglers as well. Watch as things get heated when Ivan Pecel performed on America’s Got Talent.

There were a couple of jugglers on the last episode of Last Comic Standing who also quickly got booted out the door. The entertainment world just doesn’t know what to do with jugglers. We either need to adapt and do something different or find the few places where we really belong and stick to them.

Simon Cowell, of American Idol fame, moonlights as a judge on Britain’s Got Talent where he expressed this philosophy on what it takes to be an entertaining juggler:

No one’s interested in a juggler unless there’s a good chance he’s going to kill himself.

Obviously those who view juggling as purely sport would balk at such a comment, but it’s an interesting thing to think about for anyone putting together a juggling show for the street.

Here’s one guy who Simon was very impressed with: