From ejbagai@teleport.com Sat Apr 1 15:00:29 GMT 1995 Article: 18680 of rec.juggling Path: hal.COM!nntp-sc.barrnet.net!nntp-hub2.barrnet.net!nntp-ucb.barrnet.net!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!psgrain!news.teleport.com!news.teleport.com!not-for-mail From: ejbagai@teleport.com Newsgroups: rec.juggling Subject: Re: Magnus Nicholls - Lies Date: 31 Mar 1995 20:18:16 -0800 Organization: Teleport Lines: 69 Message-ID: <3lik68$bmt@linda.teleport.com> References: <818802686.2357346@ilanet> NNTP-Posting-Host: linda.teleport.com JeanPaul Nicholls wrote: >I am pleased to see all this interest in my grandfather at his hundredth >birthday, but I am sad to see the same old lies that plauged him for much of >his career cropping up again. After reading this I had to go back and collect some of the posts about Magnus that I'd seen over the last few weeks. And then it clicked - where I'd heard about Nicholls before. As those of you know who have been following the "Contact Juggling before MM" thread a while back, I've been looking for the historical roots of camel-backing and other contact-juggling-type moves. One of my sources, an old character I found on rec.arts.vaudeville.nouveau by the name of Ralf Parnell Olios (he performed under another name which he said was a "secret") had bent my ear for an hour on long-distance to Rochester, NY (on my nickle), telling me about a performance of camel-backing he'd seen sometime in the late '30s. The theater was in the process of converting from vaudeville to movies and was a mess. One of the acts was billed as "the last public appearance of The Diabolic 'M'." Ralf said 'M' was a strange man, not really very old, who was once supposed to be a great performing juggler, and whose act had deteriorated to a pitiful combination of magic tricks, the manipulation of a number of large white balls, and inane, rambling stories about the juggler Rastelli. When the curtain went up 'M' was sitting alone in the middle of the stage like a skinny Buddha, holding all these white balls - "and he never threw even *one* of them in the air. Some juggler. Feh!" was Ralf's comment. Ralf said he used terrible music: "it had no melody and you couldn't whistle it and it just went doodle-doodle-doodle on a very bad record that was full of clicks and pops." Then there was his costume, an ugly thing that went against every principle of showmanship, according to Ralf. It consisted of black, tight-fitting, long underwear; and against the black backdrop this costume made 'M' almost invisible. He made these occult passes and motions, making the balls seem to disappear, one at a time, until only one was left - all the while mumbling in a thick accent about how "*Dis* little Rastelli is-a poof, and *dat* little Rastelli is-a kaput." This took quite some time, and Ralf reports that he probably fell asleep for a while. Then he camel-backed that one ball for a while, "doing all the usual silly side-show stuff" with it, and all the time talking about how he'd put Rastelli in a cage and stuff him down a mine-shaft, and so on. Then he stood up and we could see that he had a wooden leg. Ralf was absolutely disgusted with this playing on the sympathy of the audience, especially when 'M' kicked his leg right off its stump and into the air, so that it landed in a balance on his forehead! "Then he just lay down, right on the stage!" with the leg still balanced, and the curtain came down. "That was it! What a dumb act." Because I was so intent on squeezing actual descriptions of the contact juggling moves out of Mr. Olios, I completely missed the possibility of 'M' being anyone of note. If this offends Jeanpaul Nicholls, I truly apologize, but historical research can be terribly cruel. And there is the distinct possibility that the pitiful 'M' could have been the last public sighting of the great Magnus Nicholls. If not, then this was obviously one of his periods of depression. Again, I intend no offense to the memory of this great man, and am only reporting the results of my interview with another old vaudevillian, Ralf P. Olios. (If anyone knows his actual stage-name, please email me.) =Eric "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" No, "what" is the sound of something else entirely. The sound of one hand clapping is more like "pfft."