The one about the Zaji performance

So we went to an acrobatics performance tonight.

All I can really say is, “Wow,” those kids are impressive. It certainly makes the Ringling Bros. circus look like a joke. I’ve never seen anything like it.

I do find it sad the kids get pulled into this so young, totally miss out on any education, and get tossed away or made trainers once they hit 18, the cut-off point for performance.

The show had pretty much everything from kung fu guys jumping through spinning hoops 7 feet in the air with no springboard to girls spinning 10 plates on 10 sticks while balancing 18 glasses on their chin and swinging on a rope.

Three parts of the show stood out the most to me. The first was the guys who did the balancing board thing. They had people on top of people balancing on boards that were on top rollers. The guy on top was using the length of his board to flip cups off the end of it and up onto his head–he even did three at a time. It was majorly impressive.

Next would be the girls doing the yo-yos. They were just really cute and extremely organized. They had people on top of people passing the yo-yos horizontally and diagonally between their ropes and jumping and back-flipping before catching the yo-yos again. It was really amazing.

Lastly would be the contortionists–and not for the reason you would hope. I had the misfortune to sit in front of two Japanese businessmen and their Chinese counterpart.

If anyone on Earth deserved being called 助平なおじさん it was these clowns. They were talking all polite to their associate in Chinese, then they’d turn to each other and, in Japanese, spout some of the most lewd, perverse, and otherwise twisted language about what they wanted to do to the little 12 year old girls.

And I had the misfortune to understand every word of it …