3/5/98...Juggling.

Benny and Denise Reehl first crossed our trail when we were all fair creatures, back in the misty past. I was hustling wooden toys as Bryce the Toymaker on the festival circuit, and they were performing as Buckfield Lather and Leather.

Talk about a classic fantasy. Cherry out a Reo Speedwagon, build a collapsing portable stage and salesroom on the back, then take to the American road selling handmade belts, soap, and the old softshoe. Benny and Denise would juggle and patter and make your sides split under their canvas fly, then lighten your pockets in exchange for honest downhome products.

Like so many of our generation's physical comics, the bonzos from Buckfield spun out of Tony Montenaro's crew at the Celebration Barn, up in hills of western Maine. Clown Al, Jud the Jester, Garbo, Benny and Denise.. mainstays of the New Vaudeville that's had us hooting in the hinterlands for twenty years. The sort of plainspun hilarity that's hard to find in the big media, although Garbo was the guy in the dog suit (Barkley) on Sesame Street for longer than he'd like to remember.

Of course it's a dog's life, in the arts. Trying to raise kids and pay the mortgage out of a smalltown gate makes a six club juggle look easy. You gotta be dreamers, and Benny and Denise had extraordinary dreams. Like resuscitating an abandoned Vaudeville theater in a decayed Kennebec River town. Johnson Hall in Gardiner.

So the Lather and Leather kids moved into Gardiner and proceeded to spin a civic institution out of whole cloth, if you catch my drift. Got the whole town engaged. A public playhouse, with the emphasis on play. Initiated an annual New Vaudeville Festival to help raise funds. Kept a bunch of balls in the air to make ends meet. School programs, business seminars, coaching, directing, and keeping us laughing.

When I decided to produce a one-man show of my work in the Bowdoinham town hall, Benny offered to put on a performance for the crowd. I filled the air with mobiles and highwire acts, and Benny and Denise and Garbo shook the stage and made our bellies ache. The sight of Benny juggling flaming torches in that old tinderbox while Frizzle (the fire chief) looked on wide-eyed still makes me grin. I made toys for the performers, in lieu of wages, and the highwire act of Benny and Denise doing an 8-club juggle is still my most elaborate concoction.

Benny and Denise approached the ice cream kings, Ben and Jerry, with the idea of the ultimate Speedwagon.. a full-sized tour bus which housed a mobile troupe, and unfolded a hightech stage and set. Wherever Ben and Jerry opened a new store, the bus would show up and give folks a bellyful. Reehlization of another fanciful notion.

Over time the Reehls came to do more and more coaching and directing, helping other performers polish their act, and began to specialize in inspirational seminars for large corporations. Benny and Denise have an oldfashioned conception of business, as something which can underwrite community, and serve people.. a timely message for a service economy in an alienated society. Enter Sonny.

Benny began to evolve an act centered on a old time service station attendant. Sonny's Service Station. A seriocomic monologue on the subject of business as service. "Do you remember when an attendant always checked your oil and washed your windshield?"

With props. Back in those days I was still driving an old Dodge pickup with a wooden bed, and Benny enlisted me in the quest for antique gas station paraphernalia. Not that it was hard. Traveling with Benny is a three ring circus. The one and only time I ever went to the Maine Mall it was with Benny. He was shopping for a pair of clown shoes, and proceeded to juggle sneakers and otherwise disrupt the shopoholia. He'd have made a great shoplifter. I've never gone back to the mall. How could you top that act?

Anyhow, we cruised junkyards and antique barns and the collections of notable scavengers in search of the perfect gas nozzle, one of those pumps where the gas spins a display, a lever activated Coke machine, old signs, period tools, etc. Benny had a trailer built, with Sonny's installed, and made the rounds of fairs and business retreats. Eventually he compressed the props into a set of inflatables, letting him range farther afield.

As years went by the Reehl's performances and envisioning took on spiritual overtones, deeper themes behind the smiles. They became active Christian Scientists, and proselytizers for an enlightened capitalism.. the American Dream. Benny collaborated in a two-man show featuring Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin. The script exhorted us to remember ours is city on a hill. Vaudeville as transcendentalism and American Studies.

It was onstage as Franklin that Benny had a stroke in 1996. Rushed to a hospital, he awoke to find himself plugged into the allopathic machinery, and his whole act unraveled. It's been a long road for Benny and Denise since then. With a mix of conventional medicine and Christian Science Benny has recovered his tongue, but his body is still playing dumb. He gets around in a motorized wheelchair ("Your tax dollars at work," he tell me.), and is connected to the internet, but he tires easily, and his old twinkle glimmers where it used to dazzle you.

I went to visit them on Tuesday, and the first thing Benny did was show me how to pop a wheelie in his wheelchair. You can't stop a clown unless you tie him down. You can't stop a juggler, even if you cripple him. In his new, quieter, way Benny told me how he's practicing Spiritual Juggling. He takes a concept, he says, and holds it in his mind all day, letting everything that comes relate to it. Then he adds another concept. Like friendship, or love, or community, or service. He says he's doing a three-ball juggle now, and it's just like the physical discipline.. always seeing where the balls are, being attentive.

A crippling tragedy strips you down to the core, but it doesn't change who you are, if Benny is any indication. He still makes you laugh, and think, and you come away inspired. His family, friends, and community have rallied around him, he tells me, and the love between him and Denise is palpable. The phone was ringing with details about performances, and I figure that virtual juggling is next. Hold onto your hat.