Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

As soon as I watched - in awe - this champion juggler, I thought immediately of the wildly unconventional Swiss psychoanalyst and all-round Renaissance man Fritz Morgenthaler, M.D., who died in 1984.  Gay but largely closeted in the years when the international psychoanalytic movement maintained an almost totally homophobic standpoint, he did pioneer work in the esoteric field of ethno-psychoanalysis, joining his bosom-friends and Zurich psychoanalytic colleagues Paul Parin and his wife Goldy Parin-Matthèy on expeditions to such wild places as Papua-New Guinea to learn fundamentals about human behavior, especially the sexual behavior, of tribes virtually untouched by “civilization”.  As painter and sculptor Morgenthaler ranked high enough to have important galleries give him shows, and he took an almost passionate interest in juggling, unashamedly priding himself on his own prowess.  I had only one brief personal encounter, when he visited Berlin, but at that time he mentioned a big international meeting of jugglers he planned to attend somewhere far, far away from his home in Zurich - South America, I believe.

When a Swiss friend of mine on the CalTech faculty, who augmented his income with a moonlighting translation service to help support his family, decided he needed a book in his dossier, he asked me to collaborate with him in translating Morgenthaler’s book with the unpunctuated title “Homosexuality Heterosexuality Perversion”, which www.Amazon.com lists here.

An inordinately cocky Tennessee friend pish-tushed this dazzling juggling animation with something like “Aw, he juggles only three balls - hell, I can do that.”  Okay, okay - I myself still find it downright phenomenal, and hope my visitors here will, too.