Maine native Zachary Field brings his juggling skills to the Freeport Community Library for a performance Wednesday, Jan. 14. Field will hold the audience’s attention starting at 6 p.m. with his juggling, antics and a few surprises. Some of the fun, Field says, can be in the laughter if he makes a mistake in his routine.

Raised in the small farming community of Exeter, Field, 40, was home-schooled.

“I believe there were only about 30 home-schooled children in Maine at that time,” he said. “This would have been the late 1970s and early ‘80s. I moved to Bangor in my mid-20s, and met my wife, Karyn, at a performance. I was doing an act for her school talent show in Hampden. Yes, that’s right, the home-schooled juggler ended up marrying an eighth-grade language-arts teacher.”

Field and his wife live in Hampden with their 10-year-old son, Owen. He earns about half his income from juggling performances, he says, and also works at a restaurant. At the library, Field will juggle pins, clubs, rings and balls, and also entertain on a unicyle.

He answered questions for Tri-Town Weekly regarding his talent and his appearance at the library.

Q: You’ve performed previously at the Freeport Community Library. What’s good about a library setting for your act?

A: I actually got my start juggling for the Bangor Public Library over 25 years ago, juggling for their reading program in exchange for books on juggling. Since I taught myself to juggle from how-to books about juggling, I talk quite a bit about how books can help enrich and change your life in unexpected ways.

Q: Is there any particular age group that seems most fascinated by juggling?

A: That’s a tough one. Most people think of a juggling act as being only for children. However, I find that adults are equally fascinated by juggling, often because we have all, at one time or another, tried to copy or imitate a juggler we’ve seen on television, or in person, only to discover it seems impossible to do. As a result, I think adults have a respect for the difficulty of what they are seeing that children can’t appreciate yet.

Q: What questions do children ask?

A: My favorite question and the most difficult one to answer is, “Why do you do that?” Closely followed by, “Are you magic?” “How many can you do?” is another very popular one.

Q: The most obvious question: How did you get into juggling, and when?

A: The honest answer – boredom. I still remember the evening I started very clearly. I was 13, sitting at home, no TV time left (my parents were very strict about limiting television time, good thing, too). I was bored. The idea came to me, why not try juggling? I had a book about it, my mother had picked it up for me a few years before. I tried all evening. I didn’t have the bean-bags the book described, so I used some wooden blocks we had lying about the house. It took me three days to get three objects going for more than a few seconds. I was terrible, but I was hooked.

Q: How often do you juggle, and where?

A: I spent the first few years practicing several hours a day, sometimes as many as four or five. In recent years, it’s been more maintaining the skills I have already, learning a few new ones as I go. The best place to practice is a gym. High ceilings area necessity for jugglers.

Q: Mistakes must happen, it would seem. Or do you have it perfected?

A: Mistakes do happen. That’s the nature of live performance. In the beginning, I strove to eliminate all mistakes from my show. However, as I grew more experienced, I realized that half the fun was in the mistakes. There is no drama in perfection, and children love to see an adult caught in an awkward situation – it makes it funny.

Q: What skills do you rely on most?

A: Juggling skills, of course, but perhaps of equal importance is the skill of relating to and including the audience. That takes more time to develop than the juggling skills.

The skill of “relating to and including the audience takes more time to develop than the juggling skills,” says juggler Zachary Field, who performs in Freeport Jan. 14. Courtesy photo