Mary Jane Smith(top); Suzie "Red Nose" Jenkins(smile); Harry Shuckler(infant); Chris Sorensen(Handsome guy)
D
uring my first competition in the Eastern Washington Carnival Trials is when i learned of my acute case of tennis elbow. This common form tendonitis is most often found in jugglers and tennis players...hence Tennis elbow. Me and a group of performers who teamed up for the show came in 4th place (I blame it on the tennis elbow), which is to say a huge disappointment because we were predicted to take 3rd. I used the empty feeling of defeat as a learning experience…and quickly found myself in a bog of depression. The rest of my group, along with our trainer, put a used Christmas card in my pin bag in which the preexisting words were scratched out and it it's place was a sentence I'll remember forever. "You suck ass…You're fired."
The younger team members on my crew were especially cruel and the verbal abuse began. Let me tell you that it's not easy to be called an "ass helmet" and "bitch parading giraffe". I admit it, I was a show off, but then again I was learning my way around the showmanship of performing.
About the only thing that kept me sane during my moment of turmoil was the promising words of my dad, told to me while sharing some rather rare knee high under an old oak tree. The words he told me will ring in my ears for eternity. He said "Son, Goliath wasn't famous until David killed his ass with a rock and sling." And that phrase, even today, keeps me on the right side of survival and success. You could say I quickly saw the wisdome in that statement because I went into a training frenzy. After parting ways with my former juggling members, I quickly snatched up the best juggling producer since "John Boy Juggle Man" and Harold Pierce took the nationals in 1956. His name was Jimmy Sausage and this relationship regrettably lasted only a few weeks. He had a strange tendency to stare at me and tell me how pretty my mouth was. Anyhow I nipped that in the bud and fired him.
Continue reading.