Lawrence.com

Flying Debris is Richard Holmgren. He has a routine in which he juggles two machetes and a Twinkie and eats the Twinkie. He performs fire breathing tricks and juggles children. His dad always asks him to balance a wheelbarrow on his head to impress his dad's friends. He's from Salina.

How did you get started doing this?

I've been performing this act for about 12 years or so. It's taken me all over the country and way into Canada and Mexico and even Alaska. It's something fun I love to do. I started juggling as a kid.

How old were you?

Fourth grade. We had a juggling class in gym one day. I'm kind of a stubborn person as far as once I start to get something, I keep at it until I get it. It's good in the respect that learning to juggle, it's a great thing, but my wife would probably argue that it's not necessarily a good thing. Anyway, I learned to juggle back in the fourth grade and took it from there. Kept going, kept going and kept going until I got into high school. Of course, through high school I was too cool to juggle.

You took a hiatus from it for a while?

You know, I did other things. Chased girls and what have you. I still juggled because chicks always dig somebody that can juggle three four-way tire irons. Always an attention getter.

Then, I think about '93, met a friend of mine who also juggles. Basically, he taught me that, hey, people will pay you to do this and it's not a bad way to make a living. That really motivated me. That's where I really got good.

Were you out of high school then?

I graduated in '88, so I was a few years out of high school and not really doing:I had a great job and everything, but it wasn't my passion.

What were you doing?

I was working at a company called Geoprobe Systems. Basically, performing and showing off in general is something I've always been good at, and performing is something I love to do. Love working with the crowd. Any time you can make money doing something you love, what better thing is there in life?

When you started juggling seriously, did you keep your day job?

Yeah.

Do you still have another job?

On and off. I do it as much as I can full time.

What else do you do to support yourself?

Just odd things here and there. I work for Geoprobe Systems sometimes. They're good to me there. They let me do my thing and we work well together that way.

Describe your act.

It's a comedy act. Basically, it's a lot of audience participation. I do everything from catch a bowling ball on my face to juggle little kids, machetes and fire eating and all the things that people want to see, we hope.

Run me through what a typical show is like, from start to finish.

Lawrence, of course, it's a buskerfest. I don't know how many people around Kansas really are familiar with the term "busker," but, of course, it's a street show. So it's going to be a little different than a corporate show, where the crowd's already there, you show up and the crowd's there and you have a good time, and one person writes you a check at the end. Lawrence is gonna be a situation where it's gonna be up to us performers to build a crowd and entertain the crowd.

So the start of the show is really going to be just building the crowd and getting the crowd worked up. Of course, the more people that you can get to stop and see your show, the better odds you have of making more money. In the end, that's the name of the game, besides you want to make sure everybody has a great time. That's kind of your job, to make sure everybody has a good time. If you're having fun, and the audience is having fun, my show is not really that scripted. Just take it as it goes, because, especially in a street show, you don't know what's gonna come up. You don't know, when you have a volunteer, how that volunteer's gonna react. You're pickin' somebody off the street, so it's not like a corporate show where you'll show up and you have a general idea of what your audience is gonna be. If you're performing for a group of doctors and such, you're pretty sure you're gonna have a suit-and-tie type of event. On the street, it could be anybody.

Once you get the crowd worked up and you start your show, the middle of the show is kind of what comes along. I'll do everything from spinning basketballs-I take a basketball and I do some pretty cool ball-spinning tricks; I don't really play basketball much but I can sure spin a basketball, and what better place to show off a ball-spinning trick than Lawrence? From there, we do a lot of different tricks and get people involved and get audience members to come up and have fun with 'em, and end the show by catching a bowling ball on my face.

I imagine that if I practiced juggling long enough, I could do it on some level. But how do you learn stuff like catching a bowling ball on your face or balancing a chair on your head?

Well, first of all, you gotta think of something unique, something that people are gonna want to see. With the bowling ball, it's kind of hard to start off, because you're gonna get yourself knocked out a few times. I've had a black eye from it before. In the right conditions-I don't know if I'll do it on the street; it just depends on the conditions that day-but inside, I'll do it in a straitjacket, where I'll put a straitjacket on and I'll be basically tied up, no use of my hands at all, and I put the bowling ball on my foot and kick it into the air. It's all in the give. You gotta bring your head down at the same time the bowling ball's coming down or else you're gonna go down.

When I first started learning that trick, my family came home, caught me with a big ol' pad duct-taped to the side of my head. To my amazement, they didn't even flinch. They didn't ask, "What are you doing?" They had come home and seen me enough times trying different crazy stuff and they knew right away I was just practicing some other new stunt, so they barely even blinked an eye when they came home and saw me with a big, two-inch pad duct-taped to the side of my head.

So I got good at that, and then I worked my way down to a stocking cap and then to where I could actually land it on my head. Just like any type of trick you're learning, you start off easy and work your way up to the hard stuff.

How did you practice juggling little kids without killing them?

Usually I save that one for a little kid that will come up uninvited onstage, which will happen here and there. Of course, I don't actually throw 'em way up in the air. I tell 'em I'm going to and act like I'm really putting the kid in danger, but I don't actually put 'em in danger. I'll pick 'em up and juggle two balls and then just switch hands from here to there. That's a trick where really the build-up is a lot more than the actual trick, kind of like a magician would do.

You have a wife and kids?

I have a wife and two kids. Sometimes my kids will get involved in my act with me. I have a 15-year-old and we'll often juggle together, and I've got an 8-year-old. Two boys. We do a lot of nursing home-type shows together. Shows that I wouldn't necessarily have as much fun doing myself, but the senior citizens in nursing homes love to see little kids performing. We'll put the youngest one on what we call a rola bola, or in Kansas it could be called a Kansas surfboard. Basically what it is is we take a skateboard without wheels on it and put it on a cylinder and he'll balance on the board. He's got one foot on each end of the board and the older one and I will pass pins around him while he's in the middle. Haven't hit him yet.

So they both like juggling too?

The older one's a pretty good juggler now. Sometimes him and I will juggle fire together. The younger one hasn't learned to juggle yet, but he's more the show-off of the two. He seems to be the one that has the natural show-off instinct. The other one likes it. Of course, he likes to get paid too.

You said when you were in high school you were too cool for it for a while. Does he have that problem yet?

Absolutely. He likes to juggle and he likes to show off and such, but he's more interested in chasing girls and what have you.

What are the least glamorous parts of the job?

I don't do a lot of birthday parties anymore, but back when I did, when I first was getting started, a lot of times birthdays parties are the most, I don't want to say awful, but some of the harder experiences, because you've got a whole bunch of unsupervised kids many times. Sometimes that's not always easy. I'd say that the harder shows I've done have been some of the shows that people just assume I do all the time. But I don't do a lot of birthday parties anymore. I'm not above doing it. I would be glad to do birthday parties. It kind of just depends on the age. I've been asked to do birthday parties for 2-year-olds. Of course, at 2 years old, a kid could care less about the guy juggling, but I've been asked to perform for a whole roomful of 2- and 3-year-olds. At that age, the attention span is about nil. They don't really care too much about juggling and telling jokes. They just want to see you be silly.

I've been on the other end of the stick there, too, where I've done retirement homes by myself, before my kids got into it. For me to really get into it and have a good time, part of that is making sure the audience is having a good time. If the audience is having a good time, then I'm having a good time. It's not always easy to sense that with either the older, older crowds or, sometimes, the younger, younger crowds. As long as there's a well-diverse group of people in a show, I can usually have a good time every time.

There's always that tense moment where you're about to catch a bowling ball on your head or something like that. Same with watching cheerleaders to the pyramid at a football game. Surely there have been times where that moment has gone terribly wrong.

There have been. I was doing a college show once. Matter of fact, it was the first time I'd ever tried to catch the bowling ball on my face in a straitjacket in public.

You'd practiced it a bunch at home beforehand?

Yeah, I was pretty confident that I would nail it. I felt good about it, that I wasn't gonna have any problems. Of course, just like anything, the first time you try it in front of an audience:you could try it a thousand times at home, just like you seen the Olympics last night, where the girl gymnasts, who had done the routines they were doing a thousand times, and then they have that "oops" and fall. How many times has she done that just spotless until the pressure was on?

Anyway, I got my straitjacket on and I got everything ready, had a volunteer come up and put the bowling ball on my foot and I was ready to kick it to my head, and I'll be darned if I didn't bend down just a little too fast and I caught the bowling ball in the eye, basically, as it was coming up. The bowling ball, of course, fell to the ground. Didn't show it then, but the next day I had a good black eye. Luckily, I didn't slit my skull open there and bleed all over the place. That wouldn't have been good.

I do this trick where I juggle two machetes and a Twinkie and I'll eat the Twinkie as I'm juggling it. It's called the "eat it" routine. I think every juggler does it in some form or another. I do it with a Twinkie. Most of 'em do it with like an apple. Anyway, the only time I've ever been actually cut with a machete was removing a machete from the sheath. I did that in the middle of a show once. I was pulling the machete out of the sheath and just drug it across my thumb, for some reason, and sliced myself wide open right before I was getting ready to do the trick. I had to, basically, excuse myself to get it to stop bleeding and put a Band-Aid on, but finished the rest of the show just fine.

For the stuff that I do that would be considered reckless or stupid or dangerous or whatever you want to say, I'm glad to say I haven't been hurt much. And I should knock on wood when I say that, because you never know. The stuff I do is real. There's no gimmicks to it. It is a real bowling ball. They are real machetes. They're not machetes that you could buy at a juggling store. These are real machetes that you could buy off the shelf at any hardware store. And, of course, it's real fire. There's nothing fake about it.

Does a little kid ever get loose and get in your way?

Oh yeah. You gotta watch that. I've had to stop the show. I have a kid or even an adult-sometimes they get a little bit of liquid courage in 'em, they want to be a part of the show and want to be a little too much part of the show-had that happen before. Usually I have a good sense of the audience and if I need to I'll just stop the show and tell 'em to hold on a second, calm down a little bit, and we'll go on. That's not too uncommon, to have to tell a parent to grab a kid, or tell an adult to give me second and we can talk after the show or what have you. That happens.

What kind of reactions do you get, when you tell people, or even friends and family, that your profession is juggling?

When I was kid, I never would have thought I'd ever say my parents are proud of me. But they are. My sister is the one that got her master's degree and all that, but they don't ask her to show off much when the family's around. Whenever I'm around, they always are telling me to balance a wheelbarrow on my face or something. My parents are always wanting to show me off, which is great. I'm glad they're proud of me. I'm glad they approve of what I'm doing.

A few years ago, I went to Mexico on a mission trip. We were going into a village I guess they weren't real familiar with. It was a village that you had to hike into. Everything that was going into the village was going in on a mule or on foot. We had to walk down the side of a mountain for an hour just to get there. I don't know why anybody would live in a place like that, but they do.

One of the reasons they asked me to go was because they wanted me to do an "international language" and entertain the kids. Break the ice a little bit. We were building a soccer field there. Basically what we were doing was digging one side of the mountain and putting it on the other side of the mountain to try to flatten out a spot for them to put a soccer field. Of course, they had a lot of soccer balls. Soccer's a big sport there. I got to break the ice by spinning balls on kids' fingers and showing 'em how they could balance it on their foreheads and roll it from ear to ear.

Then I took a wheelbarrow and balanced it on my face. Took the handle of the wheelbarrow and I had to have some help lifting it up, but got it on my chin. Since I did that, my dad, always it's the first thing to do when he's got company. "Go put that wheelbarrow on your face."