Trapeeeeeeze

Have you ever thought about trying Trapeze? WOW! Just wow. We went for a friend’s birthday to a place near Boston, the Trapeze School Beantown in the building where Jordan’s Furniture has a major store.

(I once read somewhere that John Lennon wanted to write a song about Yoko Ono, but that there was just too much to write, so the whole song ended up being something like “She’s so deep, she’s so deep” (maybe “she’s so hot, so hot.”). If you can find that song, please let me know! Thanks.)

In any case, Trapeze is so wow; it’s so wow. You know even before you start that it’s going to be high up and that you will probably be a little wavering up there. Ok, you know that logically. But still you think, “What if it’s fine? What if it’s not that high?” In any case, it is! The instructors make you feel pretty comfortable in advance by having you practice a couple of times tucking your legs up towards the bar and hanging from your knees. It’s on a bar that’s hanging just over your head, but whoa!, it’s different once you stand up there, high and by yourself!

So we were all fine on the ground. And then we started going up the stairs, a few of us at a time. It’s just different once you get up there – you start that pitter-patter worrying even though logically you know that your waist is going to be harnessed into support cables the entire time. Mind and body games, right? Once you climb up the stairs, you chalk up your hands and get in position to grab the trapeze bar.

The most interesting detail is that the instructor spotting you up there holds on to your harness in the back so that it’s a ‘drop’ from the platform and not a ‘jump’. Because if you were to jump, then as in the bowling ball pendulum demo that your physics teacher may have shown you in high school, the ball would come back faster and higher on the pendulum if thrown than if just dropped. So the instructor also wanted us to be just ‘dropped’ and not ‘thrown’ so we don’t come back and hit the platform on our return swing – nobody even came close to that! So you jump, and feel a hand holding you up for a micro-second at your waist: strange feeling.

And then once you’re in the air, you need to think so much about when to tuck your legs in, and when to let go of your arms and arch backwards, and they’re calling commands up towards you from below, and it’s loud in the place because people are having coffee and watching from from the other side of the Jordan’s Furniture supercenter mall, and there’s a fountain that you see when you’ve arched your head back and are hanging by your knees, and the music often plays “It’s a Small World,” and your friends are watching you, and you want to do all the flips and tucks you can before your turn’s up.

The disappointing thing that can happen is that you can run out of steam, or out of swing rhythm – so you might be swinging and you hear from below, “Forward, back, forward,” meaning throw your legs forward, back, then forward again to that rhythm, and you might be a little late for the rhythm that the instructor’s calling out… and then he calls, “Flip!” and you do, … um, but, you’re a little slow on the rotation, and so they catch you at the waist by the harness. Then of course, you get back in line to try it again! There were about ten of us, and during a two-hour class, you can get five-six swings in, including one-two swings in which you can let go of your knees and catch the instructor’s arms as he swings towards you. BTW, it’s a major abs workout.