How to Juggle a Hat Trick

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Jeremy on behalf of Expert Village, and let's see if I can redeem myself after that last trick. What we're going to do is we're going to start with a cascade, and we're going to catch the ball on the brim of a hat. There's a whole routine that goes with this, I'm going to go ahead and teach it as we go. What I usually do when I'm with a group of kids, is I'm juggling the balls and I intend to go with the personae of the klutz, the clown, as I juggle. It makes it so that when I do what happened in that last video, when I drop it a few times, it almost seems natural to the show. What you do is you start with a regular cascade, you tell the kids that you can throw a ball up so high that it will never come down again. And then you ask them if they want to see it, if they don't say yes loud enough, you ask again until they're appropriately enthusiastic. What you do is you ask them for complete silence. You go up and say you need a couple of practice throws. You throw the first ball up pretty high, throw the other ball up even higher, higher than the camera can see. Throw the last ball, so high that there's no possible way the camera can see it. You go, OK, I think I'm practiced enough. We're going to go ahead and throw it up so high that the ball never comes down again. So ask them again at this point if they want to see it. Usually they reply in the affirmative, except the one or two kids that always seem to say no, no matter what. What you do on this one, is you're going to try and get the ball so that it peaks just a little bit above your hat brim. This is a bowler hat. It's about sixty to eighty dollars for a bowler hat like this. You've got to make sure that the brim is firm enough, it has a little bit of a curve on it so that the ball can stay on it. So what you do.. also make sure that your hat is, if at all possible, somewhat level to the ground so that it doesn't roll off the back of your hat. You go ahead and you throw the ball just barely high enough so that it lands on the hat brim. Now from here, you usually say something like, see, it never comes down again. The kids are all saying, but it's on your hat, it's on your hat. So you take your hat off and you say something along the lines of, I can't see it, and they'll say, it's on the other side. So at this point, what you do, and this part actually takes a lot of practice, is you grab the back of the brim, and you're going to swing it around and catch it inside your hat as you swing it down. And you say, oh, you're right, it was on the other side of my hat the whole time."