San Francisco's Circus Center: A Swinging Good Time

I'm standing on an eight inch ledge 20 feet off the ground. It may as well be 200 feet for all it seems. I can feel my stomach starting to shrink in anticipation and I would wipe off my sweaty palms if I hadn't already done so about a dozen times to no avail. People are down below staring up at me, yelling things that are only vaguely registering. With my chest tightening up, I take as deep a breath as I can.

And then I jump.

Think back to when you were a kid. Think back to the once a year when the circus came to town and you and your parents, or maybe your 3rd grade class, went to see the greatest show on earth. What do you remember?

The smell of the dry fairground grass. The more-scary-than-funny clowns with their overplayed reactions and clumsy choreography. The elephants being led slowly to the ring to stand on their heads. Lions and tigers and fire. (Oh my!) But the highlight, at least for me, always was the colorful acrobats on the flying trapeze.

I watched them closely. They moved a little differently than you or I. They were just more…aware of themselves and where their bodies were in relation to everything around them. And it makes sense. When you're flipping through the air two and a half stories above the ground, it's a good idea to know where you are. I always wondered what it would be like to fly through the air with the greatest of ease.

So one Sunday morning, I wandered down to an old gymnasium near Golden Gate Park and into the Circus Center of San Francisco.

The Circus Center is a professional circus school that teaches everything from tumbling and Chinese acrobatics to contortion and trampoline. They even have the country's only professional clown training program. But I was there to do just one thing: learn the flying trapeze.