There’s No Lion Around if You Run a One-Ring Circus

Talk about juggling responsibilities.

When the circus comes to town, Chester Cable keeps his hands and his feet busy.

Cable picks out the best spot for the big top, drives the tent stakes with a contraption he invented, raises the tent, erects its 999 seats, sets up its center ring, rigs the high-wire and trapeze cables, connects the sound system, checks the food vending equipment, assists the acrobats and whistles the trained performing dog into action.

Then Cable, 65, climbs into the center ring himself and juggles a 130-pound table with his feet.

That’s the way things work when you perform one of America’s longest-running circus acts. And you’re with one of the country’s smallest circuses.

Cable this year is marking half a century as a circus performer. On Friday he was amazing everyone with his versatility as he and a handful of helpers set up the L.A. Circus for a series of shows next week at Farmers Market in the Fairfax district.

“I like doing this kind of work,” said the brawny, wisecracking circus man as he helped hoist a 40-foot, flag-topped pole into place in a corner of the market’s parking lot.

“I guess I’ve been around so long I know how to do just about everything. I even make cotton candy if we’re short-handed.”

*

What the 6-year-old L.A. Circus lacks in immensity, it makes up in intimacy.

Known as a one-ring, one-elephant affair, it is run by the Los Angeles Foundation for the Circus Arts--a nonprofit group funded in part by the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs.

The little circus moves between shopping centers, parks and schools during the spring and summer. Off-season shows take some of its performers to Japan and Europe.

Once headed for extinction, the circus has made a comeback thanks to small tent shows, said Wini McKay, a former trapeze artist who is one of L.A. Circus’ founders.

McKay met Cable 22 years ago at the back of the Philippe restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. In those days, as many as 100 clowns, high-wire walkers and assorted other circus folk gathered there weekly for Paul Eagle’s Circus Luncheon Club, named after a legendary circus man.

The luncheon club faded away when its older members began dying off. So McKay and other veterans formed their Foundation for the Circus Arts to help fill the void.

“Our goal is to open a full-time, year-round circus academy in Los Angeles,” she said Friday as she watched Cable and his crew erect the big top and install the bleacher seats carried on special trailers built by Cable.

Every seat in the 80-by-130-foot L.A. Circus tent is close enough for spectators to see the sweat on aerialists’ brows. It also gives children who sign up for free circus workshops an upfront view.

A dozen workshops are scheduled for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday afternoons. Promising young workshop participants may be invited to return to perform in the real show. Its eight performances are set for afternoons and evenings next Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Tickets are $10 for adults over 18 and $5 for seniors, children and teenagers.

Performers include a four-man acrobatic team, the Vita Bros., along with clowns, Hula-Hoop champion Matt Plendel, balancing artists Sammy Walton and Jerrod Twomey and aerialist Darlene Williams.

Trapeze artist Debra Zitzelberger, a former Ringling Bros. performer, watched as Cable worked on the big top.

“If they don’t rig it right, you fall,” said Zitzelberger, 32. “Your life is in his hands. But Chester knows what he’s doing. He’s been doing it forever. That gives you confidence.”

*

Cable enjoys kicking around the old days with other circus veterans. In fact, he says, “I got my start kicking people around.”

That was in Allentown, Pa., where his next-door neighbor, Lewis Bogart, taught him foot juggling.

“We did tent shows, nightclubs and fairs in the ‘40s,” said Cable, who now lives in South-Central Los Angeles.

“There are old-timers still working in their 70s. That’s not to say that I’ll still be doing it when I’m that age.”

But Cable has no plans to put down the huge table he now spins with his feet.

He can rotate the 10-foot table 30 times in 38 seconds. And that’s quite a feat.