GRANDFATHER OF A HUMAN CANNONBALL. When I lived in New York, I read the Village Voice regularly. Nat Hentoff wrote regularly in the Voice about civil rights and jazz. I read the civil rights columns, which were excellent, regularly. One day I read an article by Hentoff that made my hair stand on end. He told about how he had gone to see his daughter perform for the first time as a trapeze artist. He believed in her independence and had supported her choice of profession, and he felt he should show support by watching her performance, but his reaction to her choice of profession was what mine would have been. This article by Aimee Levitt in the Riverfront Times, quotes the same article I read. “We argued bitterly and raucously in my long-distance attempts to get her to stay on the ground.” Hentoff said in the article: “”Once the act began, I became so involved in the choreography that I forgot to be afraid.” I don’t think that would have happened to me.
Now the daughter of the trapeze artist has become a human cannonball. (And the human cannonball’s brother is a high-wire walker). (Link via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution)