Jester Prince is the story of The Flying Karamazov Brothers comedy/theatre/musical/juggling troupe and their rise from San Francisco street corners and Renaissance Fairs to Broadway, television, film, and Carnegie Hall. It traces how the author's Ashkenazi and Scots-Irish ancestry launched him into a childhood in suburban Los Angeles just as the Hippie Revolution exploded, inspiring a biology prodigy to take up the juggling balls that would change the course of his life and open unexpected possibilities. In college, he and the unpredictable, ambitious Sephardic guy across the hall began to explore ways to invent handmade theatre, trying anything that worked, from madrigals to magic, tap dance to martial arts to ballet, to juggling sickles, hatchets and torches. The troupe's climb, step by wild step from the bottomest bottom to the heights of fame (if not exactly fortune), is paralleled by the author's own attempts to live out his bold ideals of anarchistic community in both his professional and personal lives. Adventures with cultural icons and celebrities abound, including: living with counter-culture hero Ken Kesey, traveling with the Grateful Dead, doing laundry with poet Allen Ginsburg, and brandishing knives and guns with Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson; juggling in Jimmy Carter's White House, then insulting Ronald Reagan on stage at The Kennedy Center; film-making in Morocco, on horse- and camel-back, with Danny De Vito, Michael Douglas, and Kathleen Turner; stage and TV shows with Robin Williams, Dolly Parton, Frank Sinatra, Jay Leno, and Jerry Seinfeld; chats about The Theatre with monumental playwright Sir Tom Stoppard; and shenanigans aplenty with fellow "New Vaudevillians" Avner the Eccentric, Bill Irwin, Artis the Spoonman, and Penn & Teller. Their travels brought them around the (primarily) English-speaking world, from London's West End, the Edinburgh Festival and Ireland's biggest TV show to festivals and theaters in Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Bermuda, and Israel, running their odd comedy experiment on vastly different populations and observing the sometimes surprising effects. The Karamazovs explored dozens of ways to evocatively demonstrate the inherent musicality of Juggling, and did their best to forever quell the feeling of universal disappointment for both audiences and jugglers when a club is dropped. Though the act of juggling with its philosophical, neurological, and metaphorical implications was their first love, the book aims to end the misconception that The Flying Karamazov Brothers have ever been "just" a juggling act.
Includes How To Juggle instructions!