How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Scarves

Quick reminder: the name “K Anything” is based off the movie Say Anything.  With that in mind I decided to try and give my articles names based on movies.  I might even go back and change some old ones.  This probably won’t last long, but I thought of this when I was trying to think of a title today.

A lot of times when people learn to juggle in gym class or whatever, they use scarves. We have never used scarves to teach people to juggle. When we let the kids come up afterwards and try to juggle, we just use the stuff we have, which is mostly balls.  It is nice for us that we don’t have to get extra props for the after-show, and I think it is nice that the kids actually get to try out what they saw instead of something different.  Second, I have always maintained that if you actually want to learn to juggle, balls are the way to go.  In juggling, throws tend to be more important than catches. If you make a good throw the catch is pretty easy.  Thus learning to juggle is about learning to make good throws, and you can’t really throw a scarf. You basically just lift it up and drop it. Proponents of scarves would say that they allow you to learn the pattern without worrying about throws. The basic juggling pattern is literally just right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left….. so I think that it is safe to say the throws and not the pattern are thing that people actually have to worry about if they are trying to learn to juggle.  Those are the main reasons we have never had scarves to help kids learn to juggle

The last couple of times we have had kids come up to juggle, there have been a couple of young ones who couldn’t really get it. I think everyone still had a good time, but I wonder if having scarves would help. I think that the main reason we really don’t have scarves is a stubborn mindset of wanting to do things our way. We never used scarves to learn, so why should anyone else. I still kind of agree with the idea that learning how to juggle is learning how to make good throws and scarves don’t help with that. However sometimes when I am watching over the chaos that is our “juggling workshops”, I can’t help but wonder if scarves might be more practical especially for someone who is only going to practice for 10 minutes.

Somehow K Anything has become a place where I write down things that I want to try, and the newest thing I want to try is juggling scarves. First, I’ll have to get some and try them out to see what I think of them. Then I will bring them along for the after-show juggling workshop to see if they help any of the kids. Finally, I think I will try to come up with a real juggling routine with scarves. I don’t know what exactly that means yet. I know I want it to be interesting and impressive, not just goofy. I don’t know if it will ever actually make the show. Maybe I will be able to come up with something good enough for my Fourth of July act.  I know the Fourth of July act is suppose to be a surprise, but there is a pretty good chance that Darren won’t read this and an even better chance that he won’t believe that I will actually use scarves for my Fourth of July act.  So even though I am writing this down right now, Darren will still be surprised if I actually do it.