Jason Kollum was at the Marcus Public Library on Wednesday evening (June 14) and entertained an audience of all ages with his Juggling Show.
He had a colorful display upfront with a large container to one side. It didn’t take long for the kids to respond to Kollum’s enthusiasm when he began his presentation. Some of the kids were sitting on pillows on the floor. He borrowed a pillow from one of them and asked them to be very quiet before he showed them what he could do with that pillow. He held the pillow up and whirled it around on one finger. From his finger the pillow moved to being balanced on his nose!
Now what most jugglers have is what he brought out next—five different colored big rings. He had three in one hand and two in the other as he began to juggle them without any falling out of line.
“Has anyone got a cap that I could borrow?” he asked. There were many kids that answered but he only needed one. What could he do with this cap? With only one cap how was he going to juggle this? Besides juggling, he was going to show us like the pillow, another part of his juggling act—that being balancing. He balanced the bill of the cap on his nose!
Time for some juggling as he brought out from the container upfront some orange and blue balls. Just when you thought a blue ball was at a certain place, he had juggled it to another and the orange ball took its place.
He took out a “tower” from behind the blue curtain upfront. As he was talking to the kids, the tower kept getting smaller in height. What was going on? The kids were all yelling that it was getting smaller. He finally went and pushed a magic button and immediately the tower got higher. Then he put a red balloon on the top of the tower and suddenly the balloon was being blown up! He wrapped it around and around and the balloon turned out to be a “flower”. How can a flower be without a stem? Once again he used the tower to blow up a green balloon and—there was a stem for the flower.
He had two big soccer balls that he twirled one on a finger as the other one was being twirled on the top of the first one! He asked for a volunteer and twirled a soccer ball on the kid’s nose!
Time to ask for some help from the audience again. This time he wanted a baby shoe, a shoe from an older child, and an adult shoe. What was he going to do with these three different sized shoes? He had a colorful board that he lined the three shoes on. Then he stepped hard on the end of the board causing the shoes to leave the board and as the shoes went up, he began to juggle all three of them.
Volunteers helped with three boxes (on top of each other) with a glass of water on the top box. He began to juggle clubs (sticks) but he hadn’t forgotten about the boxes. All of a sudden, the three sticks were not being juggled and the boxes were falling from each other and—the glass of water was caught without spilling any of it!
He had other acts involving the kids that they were more than glad to assist him with. On his conclusion of his juggling show, he had the kids line up and he would get a ball to balance on his finger and then moved it to the kid’s finger with it spinning. No kid moved out of the line as each wanted to have a spinning ball on their finger!