For many teenage Mainers, unicycling is an everyday part of life.

Clowning Around Maine

When Cathy Bennett watches her 18-year-old son, Dana, socialize with ease among his peers, does she credit her own good parenting skills? The peaceful town they live in? Dana's lifelong good nature? Perhaps. But she also credits his ability to juggle . . . and we're not talking metaphorically.

Gym Dandies founder Jon Cahill (right) and his son, Dana.

The troupe has incorporated as many as seventy-three 6-foot unicycles in a single routine.

"He's been able to stand up in a huge group of people and perform while exuding confidence," she says. That confidence has a lot to do with the Gym Dandies Children's Circus, an after-school program that trains kids ages 8-18 in the circus arts. In addition to juggling and stilt walking, students also learn to use a 6-foot unicycle. Ergo, neither Dana nor his 13-year-old sister, Carolyn, ever have to threaten to run away to join the circus - they get to be part of one every day.

To find this place, you'll have to head north - way north - to Scarborough, ME, a town where you'd expect to see lobstermen. Instead, you'll find swarms of unicyclers.

"When our kids graduate and go off to college, a lot of them take their unicycles with them," says Jon Cahill, the program's founder. "They ride onto campus on them, and they get a great social following."

Cahill, 59, founded the program almost by accident in 1981. As a physical education teacher at Wentworth Intermediate School, he gave kids juggling balls in order to make his after school athletics program more accessible and fun for the whole student body.

"I really wasn't a juggler. I sort of learned with the kids," he recalls. The classes became so popular that he began a juggling club, which quickly turned into an all-out circus club.

In 1982, his students held a juggle-a-thon to raise funds for unicycles, and Gym Dandies was born. Today, the program has about 230 participants every year.

In recent years, Cahill and his troupe have performed in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City and in the National Independence Day Parade in Washington, D.C., incorporating as many as seventy-three 6-foot unicycles in a single routine.

"I think almost every kid in Scarborough has tried the Gym Dandies at some point in their school career," says Bennett. Next year, Dana will be a freshman at Bates College, a college he may have chose for a reason other than its stellar academics: It has a juggling club and lots of good unicycle parking to boot.

Posted on June 12, 2006