THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, August 1, 1994 TAG: 9407300073
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: Daydream Believers
Occasional series about Hampton Roads residents who act on their
dreams...
SOURCE: BY PATRICK K. LACKEY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 128 lines
THE FIRST TIME Janet Peterson soared through the air on the flying trapeze, she was a 40-year-old vacationer at Club Med on St. Lucia in the Caribbean.
It was December 1986. She was an English teacher seeking respite from students and cold. She was 30 feet up.
``When my feet left the board,'' she recalled, ``I was euphoric. I remember thinking, `I am in heaven.' ''
Today, eight years later, she remembers that first flight with a clarity born partly of fear, partly of pleasure.
Like the hundreds of flights that followed, it began with a long hand-over-hand climb up a ladder. At 20 feet up she was scared, with 10 feet still to go.
Finally she reached the narrow launching board and stepped onto it.
``The board is about 8 inches wide,'' she said, ``and it swings in the breeze, so you don't feel secure.'' While waiting on the board for some lines to be untangled, she asked herself what she was doing up there and got no answer.
A Club Med trainer urged her to check out the view below, but she was not in a sightseeing mood.
Finally, grasping the trapeze bar with both hands, she swung off the board into space, and suddenly she seemed to know what she was doing.
At the top of the first swing out, on the instruction ``knees up,'' she lifted her legs over the bar. During the return swing, she released her hands and hung by the knees.
As she swung forward a second time, she again grasped the bar with her hands, and she released her legs.
Then, she said, a trainer talked her through a back flip dismount. She landed in the net on her seat, the way she was supposed to.
Peterson has snow- and water-skied. She has windsurfed and skated. She has taught teenagers.
Trapeze flying, she said, is the biggest thrill of all.
At the top of each swing, she is weightless and free.
``But you are more than weightless,'' she said. ``You are not just floating, you are being propelled upward. Everything is in motion all the time.''
It feels, she said, just like flying.
In her first few magical seconds of flight, there lept into her mind the impossible dream of joining a circus, not as a clown or a wardrobe lady or a ticket seller, but as a trapeze flier. Today, at age 48, she clings to that dream and does what she can to make it come true.
For seven straight years, she flew one week a year at various Club Meds. This school year she flew at the Club Med at Playa Blanca on Mexico's Pacific coast during both her Christmas and Easter vacations.
Back home, to prepare herself for vacation flights, she lifts weights, exercises aerobically, stretches half an hour a day, watches tapes of great trapeze fliers and practices her trapeze tricks in her mind.
But, of course, she can't fly without the equipment, without a catcher to catch and a board man to time the trapeze release so when she spins to catch the bar . . . it's there.
``I have this notion,'' she said in a recent interview in her Tallwood High School classroom, ``if I could do this regularly, I could become good at it. I started out so well. It was so effortless at the beginning. It was such a surprise. Not only do you have a chance to do it, but it's easy.''
At 5 feet even and 100 pounds, she has the body for trapeze flight.
Forty years of ballet lessons taught her body control, and photos show her toes are extended in flight.
She can do a double-somersault release, and she's working on complicated release-and-catch tricks, one involving 16 steps. She can hang by her heels.
After her first week of flight, she called her mother in Chicago, where Peterson grew up. She said she told her mom, ``You will never guess what I learned how to do.''
Peterson described her trapeze flights, and to her amazement, her mother said, ``That's doesn't surprise me. Your great grandfather and his brother were in a circus.''
In the late 1800s, they were The Flying Antonios. Peterson had never heard of them before, but she has since seen their circus trunk, which remains in the family. It contains playbills and costumes. The men are shown standing on the ground by a big rope hanging down.
The trick they apparently did is called the Spanish Web. While one performer standing on the ground swings the rope around faster and faster, a second performer spins from part way up it, a wrist or ankle held by a loop.
``I tried doing that,'' Peterson said. ``It takes a great deal of strength, and it's not fun.''
What's fun is to soar and be caught and to soar again back to the bar and to somersault down to the net.
The first man ever to catch her was Peter Gold, since hired by Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. When the circus performed in Hampton Roads in March, Gold, swinging by his legs, caught the flier who did the quadruple somersaults.
In circus talk, the flier and catcher connect in ``the grip of life.''
On only her second time on the trapeze, Peterson said, she stretched her arms out on the command ``hep,'' and Gold caught her in ``the grip of life.''
``I went through about six tricks just like that,'' she said. ``I thought I was on a stellar rise to circus stardom.''
Then the tricks got harder.
At the Club Med at Playa Blanca, Peterson is known as ``iron hands,'' because her hands never blister and split no matter how long she practices. Her hands are spared, she figures, because she is light and relaxed.
``The trainers' goal, they say, is to see that guests have a good time,'' Peterson said. ``I drive them crazy because I am so fanatical about it.''
Last Easter, her first trip back up the ladder, she wanted to fly from one swinging bar to another. The trainer said she couldn't start with a trick that hard after three months off. Thirty feet up, she argued with the trainer, though she knew better.
Afterward she apologized to the trainer for arguing. She said she was told, ``We understand you. You are different. You are driven.''
Peterson is single. She owns a house but is considering renting it out, taking a year leave of absence from teaching and joining the Club Med staff as a trainer. Then she could fly every day and try to get good enough to perform with a circus.
``The only thing holding me back right now,'' she said, ``is my dog.''
Joe, an ailing 13-year-old cocker spaniel, would not be welcome at Club Med, she said, and she couldn't leave him behind.
After Joe dies, she said, she very well might spend a year in flight.
She tells the trainers at Club Med, ``I am on a quest to become the world's oldest living trapeze artist.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photos courtesy of Janet Peterson
Color photo by Charlie Meads, Staff
Janet Peterson, 48, teaches at Tallwood High School in Virginia
Beach.
by CNB