Hello everyone!  This is Jen Kouri, and now that I’m a bit recovered from the Duncan Crew’s crazy schedule, I am happy to share with you the fun time Colorado had with Nate, Seth, and Emil visiting!   

 First of all, the van is amazing!  I couldn’t stop staring at it, and made everyone take pictures of me in front of it, so it will be forever engrained in my memory.  It made an awesome backdrop for the demos that the crew did while in Colorado. 

 There were seven demos in total in Colorado, four of which I was able to help out with.  The first demo I attended was at the Fort Carson Army post on Saturday.  Jon Gates met up with us (my yo-yo mentor!), and it was awesome to have a bunch of people to help teach kids!  So many kids and parents were excited to learn how to yo-yo, and it was great to see big smiles on their faces.  We sold out all of the yo-yos that Ft Carson had!

 We then quickly drove over to Manitou Springs where all five of us were to demo at a local yo-yo store, Yoyoloco/Plinkity Plink.  The owner of the store, Mark, was great in really promoting the crew’s demo and we had a wonderful crowd for our show.  There are so many great players who attend the Yoyoloco club, and I am so thankful for everyone who came to support us!  It was also great to see Fee-Fee’s parents and sister, who I haven’t seen in a couple years!     

 Sunday morning was our third demo at Toys ‘R Us in Westminster Colorado.  Two people who have been inspirational to me in the yo-yo Colorado world showed up, Jimmy Peng of Team Yoyojam and Leo Lohman.  Leo is local in Denver and makes amazing wooden yo-yos.  When I first began yo-yoing, Leo had made me a couple sets of beautiful wooden yo-yos, which always remind me when I throw them that Wood is Good!  Several groups of kids also showed up who were already into yo-yoing and wanted to learn more tricks.  One kid was getting ready to have a yo-yo themed birthday, which sounds so awesome!

 At this point in the tour, I was getting sad because the crew had one more demo before they had to immediately leave for a 5 a.m. news taping in Utah.  The Wizard’s Chest was our final demo, and I had a great time!  So many club members made it out, and thanks to everyone for your support!  My favorite part of the demo was the Mongu army (I love my new Mongu hoodie!)  We had a bunch of us walking down the middle of the street running into things.  I hope Emil posts some video.  I also loved Seth’s cool string trick that he performed at the end…which I won’t describe.

 I am going to miss everyone, but have been greatly inspired by everyone!  Emil’s juggling is amazing, and he has awesome showmanship and knows how to perform.  Nate’s freehand is stunning, and I feel honored to have seen his National’s freehand routine.  He’s a wonderful teacher and taught me some great tricks.  Seth’s style is so unique and completely mesmerizing to watch.  I had the best time reminiscing about the yo-yo past with him!

 I feel so honored to have the Duncan crew visit Colorado, and wish them safe travels!  Have fun at Nats!         

jen

Well Utah its been fun. We were delirously tired for a lot of our visit, but the response to our presence was top notch. We met up with a LOT of people.

Firstly, I really should mention Nate Shurilla, who’s met up with us at BYU a few times and is a top notch player and top notch dude. Nate, if you’re reading this, you ROCK. And I can’t wait to show the world what you look like tied into a pretzel throwing loops. :-p
(just wait folks, its pretty funny).

I started our last day in Utah by running off to a radio station. Yoyo? Radio? I know, odd right, but stick with me. Yesterday through our friend Big Buddah I got in touch with a regional morning radio personality. He was really interested in having one of us on in the morning just to chit chat and joke around. I got up NICE and early and ran off in the rain to the radio station. Synopsis? I was TOTALLY under prepared, but it was AWESOME. This dude Steve Harmon is a riot. First and foremost he failed to warm me that they post videos and come up with random challenges for guests… as a result we have some very embarrassing footage of me. I was so tired I couldn’t hit ANYTHING on the spot, please feel free to laugh heartily.

Me trying to hit as many tricks as I can in a minute:

Teaching Harmon the Basics:

Anyway, after the show I went to pick up the boys, pack up the hotel and take off towards our demo. After a fantastic lunch we hit the Clark Planetarium where we’ve been all day. I’m actually really surprised by the mix of people we’ve had here, its been a really dynamic demo with spurts of school field trips and such.

Tonight? Oh man, tonight we test our ability to stay awake once again with an 8 hour drive to Reno, NV. If you’re in the area check us out on Channel 8 in the morning, and come hang out at Games Galore!

Another busy day, but a relief compared to our 36 hour stint. The morning started with adventures involving laundry machines. Most notable about these adventures is what people like Nate and I are willing to wear around the hotel while everything else is in the machines. I wont go into to much detail, but there are definitely Hawaiian swimming trunks and euro -trashy linen shirts involved….

Anyway, our first gig was at a TRU about an hour from where we were staying. We were met by a pretty good crowd (a lot of people have been finding the website from the most random sources!) and had a lot of fun teaching, fixing yoyos, and showing off as per usual!

We had to rush to our second gig, and with traffic barely made it to set up and such. A lot of players had planned to meet us there so we had a crowd throughout and the demo overall was pretty fun. We stayed a bit late to entertain folks as the store closed and then took off for the BYU Yoyo and Juggling Club! Oh how I LOVE a good juggling club. There was plenty of yoyo, some astrojax, and I geaked hardcore with some clubs. I even managed to get 6 clubs going a couple of times and I haven’t run that in years! We’ve been pretty good about meeting up with both yo-yo and juggling clubs through out, but I hope we can do even more as we continue the tour. Its SO much fun.

We headed back North in preparation for the following day and though it took us a while to find the place we finally ate and settled in for the night. Still recovering from the SUPER long day we hit the sack pretty quickly, though 6 hours later I was up for a Radio Interview!

If you thought Duncan Crew were hard core, then just wait ’til you read this. The truth is, there shouldn’t even be a dash between day 33-34 because for us they were one and the same!
Our “day” started off with a demo from 11-3 at a TRU in Westminster. We had the full crew of Colorado demonstrators with us, and even some extra players (Jen’s brother and walkins) who came to hang out. There were so many people with yo-yos that even when traffic lulled we had a good crowd and enough teachers for any kid to get some individual attention.

From TRU we went to one of the most impressive toy stores I have ever seen. The Wizard’s Chest is a legend among toy stores. Nate’s heard of it working at A-Z in North Hampton, and I vaguely remember hearing about several years ago while working at Red Dragon Toys in Brunswick, ME. Its a crazy store, but most notable for us is their massive yo-yo club. John Gate’s actually runs the club, so we took his lead and after a while of hanging out he and I MCed an informal show for everyone. It was extremely well received and we had a lot of fun. I was really impressed with the caliber of players (both yo-yos and tops I might ad) that were there. We took a TON of video and photos as well, so much so that processing them takes time we haven’t had since then!

–We’re processing everything tonight, so check back later or in the morning for photos and such–

But here is where the story gets interesting. We managed to land a spot on one of the biggest regional morning shows in the country which is based in Fox 13 news in West Valley, UT. The only time they could fit us in by the time I spoke to them was 5:30am the following morning. For those of you unaware, this is 8.5 hours by car away from Denver, CO…. It was a loooooong night. Trading off drivers, working as a team to keep energetic and awake, stopping frequently to jump around and such. It took us 10.5 hours total to complete the drive from when we finished eating dinner from our gig at the Wizard’s Chest at 7:30pm.

Because of the time difference we pulled in at about 4:30am, and deliriously spent the following hour making sure we had found the right location, booking a hotel, etc. By some magic we met up with Big Buddah of Fox 13 (perhaps the coolest news caster EVER of all time) and spent about 3 hours shooting various segments. We may have been delirious, but had a great time doing what we’re best at!

Alas, the story does not end there. ::GASP:: We finished with Big Buddah just in time to run off to our first gig of the day at the Brigham Young bookstore in Provo, UT. We managed to grab a lightening breakfast before the demo, and jumped in full force with a couple local players who showed up! Big thanks to them as it really helped drive traffic and kept us energetic.

From here we had one more gig to finish the day, and heading about an hour North to Park City we spent a few hours at J.W. Allen Toy Store. This little privately owned shop is right next to the Olympic village from 2002 and is a pretty rad little store. We had a ton of people show up in the end, and were even blessed with the legendary presence of Dale Myrberg. This dude is awesome. A player for 60 years and a full professional entertainer for 15(?) this dude knows what he’s talking about, loves to share, and is more energetic than most 5 year-olds. It was great to have him come out and we look forward to seeing him again at Nationals!

The demo was so busy we went long, but finally we headed to dinner with a couple players and then headed off to our hotel. Finally at and around or 36th hour, on a total of 3 hours of sleep each, we went to bed. And oh how good it was.

Hey everyone,

sorry for the slow down in posts these past few days, we’ve just had so many awesome things going on its been hard to find the time. The past couple days we’ve done demos on various army bases around Colorado Springs, and I have to say, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many yo-yos fly out the doors in such a short period of time! It wasn’t like people just bought themselves a yo-yo as novelty either, almost everyone bought a yo-yo so they had something of their own to learn with us on. We’ve probably taught several hundred individuals everything from dribble up to rock the cradle in the past 3 days. Insanity!

Today took the cake though. We had an awesome demo at Fort Carson, and then proceeded towards Yoyo Loco in Manitou, the town we visited when first arriving in Colorado. Upon arrival we found an already gathered crowd of people sitting in the 15 rows of bench seating in front of a small roofed stage. We quickly laid out our show to include John and Jen, set up the van and kicked off the most amazing 30 minutes of skill toys you’ll ever see. Within the first 7 minutes we had every bench seat crammed and at least 20+(at least 30 at one point) people lining the sides. By the end I’d say we had a crowd of between 75-100 people! As usual I ran as MC throughout the whole show and I’m not sure I’ve ever had a crowd that responsive before, it was fantastic.

Unfortunately while running a show its a little hard to be taking pictures and video, but Jen’s parents were there and her father has a top notch camera which he used all evening. They’ll be passing along a bunch of pictures to us tomorrow and I can’t wait to share them with all of you. We’ve got some pictures of our own coming too, along with a series of short video features and our next clip video. Keep an eye out because some cool content is headed your way the second we can sit down and export some stuff!

Oh, and the three of us just kind of realized Nationals is literally in a few days! So psyched! Who’s gonna be there?!

Best
E

Wooooow what a long day, but a good one. We started bright and early (or perhaps I should say dark and early) to get on the morning news in Pueblo, CO. After our excellent anchors learned some new newfangled yo-yo tricks, we took off in hopes of getting a glimpse of Royal Gorge on the way to our demo location for the day. We unfortunately couldn’t get on the bridge and enter the actual park, but quickly shot some pictures and footage to remember the awesome site that the gorge is. Truly impressive.

We made it to the Airforce base pretty early but it took us a while to get through all the gates and have the van checked etc. When we pulled into the store we were just in time to run in and start the demo. We were set up for two, two hour spots today, and ended up with pretty good groups of people during both. For me personally though today’s demos were HUGE. I’m finally starting to understand 5a a bit, and probably learned at least 5-6 separate 5a tricks including helicopter and propeller. Seth and Nate are phenomenal teachers, and we came up with some VERY cool new tricks today that hopefully you’ll all get to see at some point.

Yesterday we were also in the news first thing in the morning. Big Channel 9 NBC! Pretty sweet, we even had the van as a backdrop so viewers got the whole package. We followed that with a TRU demo and then, most importantly, met up with Jen Kouri! Jen is awesome and will be with us for a couple demos this weekend for which I’m really excited. And the best part? She gave us our stock of 80th Anniversary Freehand Zeros. Yeah that’s right, you want them? We have them. Come and get’em!

Hello blog readers and blog reader-ettes. This here is Nate Sutter bestowing some funky blog knowledge upon you.

Let me start by saying this tour has been awesome to the max. Everytime that we pull into a new city my mind is blown away by what crazy and exciting things we discover, and what new awesome friends we make. Each city just keeps getting better. Kansas City was no exception.

The story starts with a bit of something Emil mentioned already on the blog. We met a juggler on Saturday evening who was drawn to us because of Emil yo-yoing. He introduced himself and said he was just starting out with yo-yos. He also mentioned that he was a clown from the Ringling circus and was working on an act involving yo-yos with another clown. We chatted and had much to talk about. He then invited Emil and myself to the circus the following day. Lucky for us, the circus fit right into our schedule. We went back to the hotel, got some work done and got some good rest after a long day.

The next day we woke up early and hungry. Our demonstration was at a Toys ‘R Us in Overland Park. The show was extremely close to our hotel so we had time for a good breakfast, and good it was. The demonstration went very well. We had quite a few people show up excited to see us, after seeing our other show on television the day before. Little John showed up and was a riot as usual. Kansas City; let me tell it to you straight. Little John is the bee’s knees! I officially nominate him as a candidate for first president of the official Kansas City yo-yo club. Getting back to the story now, our demonstration wrapped up and we hurried to the sports arena to meet the clown from the night before backstage. After a little bit of waiting and some elephant crossing he greeted us cheerily and led us to clown alley. We met some of the other clowns and started showing off tricks and talking about yo-yos. It wasn’t long before he tells us that the other clown he is working on the yo-yoing with goes by the name of Kricket.

It is at this point in the story that I almost dropped some masonry if you know what I mean. Let me explain. I have this cousin that I haven’t seen in probably more than five years. Last I heard he had joined the circus and was a clown with the same name. I realized that they could be the same person. Almost immediately after this realization my Cousin Jim walks around the corner with a big smile on his half clown painted face. We man hugged like tough guys and then discussed the inexplicability of this happenstance. We caught up a bit, and I showed off some tricks that I thought would be good for clowning. Unfortunately, it was about time for the pre-show to start. Emil and I made our way out to the arena floor and met up with our new and old clown friends in full clown costume. The pre-show was fun; Emil and I got a chance to see some of the performers do routines.

Showtime came around and it was WICKED AWESOME. I had never seen a Ringling Brothers circus show before. It is a big to do! The costumes were both ridiculous and amazing. There was singing, dancing, animals, jokes and clowns. After the show Emil and I went to dinner and shortly after headed to the Ringling train. This part is amazing to me, that the Ringling Circus still travels by train. Anyways, Kricket shows us his room and the first thing I spot is a Peelander Z poster. For those of you who do not understand, Peelander Z is a Japanese action comic punk band from New York City that plays each year at the International yo-yo open. Needless to say, instant awesomeness. We headed to a nearby room and played yo-yos until the wee hours of the night. We talked, laughed and joked around until it was past all of our bed times.

It was awesome.

End.

Colorado = Friggen’ Gorgeous.
Can everyone just come hang with us here so I can hike every day? That would be great. Ok cool. This place is amazing.
The first thing we did was take a walk through the Garden of the Gods. This place is epic. The “garden” is essentially this gathering of huge red stones that stick straight up in this one area of valley just west of Colorado Springs. These rocks are absolutely beautiful, and get this, their bolted for climbing! Unfortunately, when we did our walk I wasn’t registered to climb there, but we checked it out as we were leaving and I’m now registered to climb on any rocks in any Colorado Springs park… SO COOL!

Alright, so after Garden of the Gods we felt like a more rough and tumble hike was in order. The Garden is a really well kept area with side walks and such, not much in terms of “hiking”. After a little research we got the low down on Pike’s Peak which has a pretty famous long trail. The boys did the first 1 1/4 up the trail with me, and then went to check out the amazingly cute town of Manitou, where we have a show on Saturday. I trucked up to the 4 mile mark at break neck speed which had a FANTASTIC view, juggled 5 snowballs, and then ran back down the trail. It was incredible, I live for that stuff.

Before driving to Denver to finish our day and hit the sack we found perhaps the coolest place of all time. A penny arcade that has existed since 1931 and has arcade machines as old as the mid 20’s. Its PHENOMENAL. A must see if you ever make it to this area. We spent at least an hour or two rockin’ some old school pinball and the most awesome ghetto soccer games you’ve ever seen!

Some of these pictures are hard to understand unless you were there, but check them out, they’re pretty rad.

So there is one particular part of Day 26 that should absolutely be told, but I will leave that story to the Sutter Master to relate to you all. I will say however that we continued to love Kansas City and the people in it. A solid TRU demo followed by an entire afternoon and evening at the Circus… incredible.

Between teaching yo-yo tricks in Clown Alley and then experiencing Ringling Bros first hand both back stage and front… man we felt like yo-yo rock stars. Ringling itself is a production of EPIC proportion that runs like a well oiled piece of machinery and it was awesome to see the cogs lying around or hanging out cracking jokes before all coming together for the massive presentation that is that show.

Important points:
- Elephants are awesome.
- Tigers are scary.
- Motorcycles wizzing around a steal ball of death is SO COOL!!
- Chinese Jugglers are too good for reality.
- Some acrobatic stunts just shouldn’t be possible by humans.

In many ways circus shows have been turning more and more into a glorified form of children’s theater, but honestly, who cares! Its still awesome animals and crazy stunts. Big thanks and props to our friends Aji and Kricket in the clown car for having us along, and if you guys are reading this, can’t wait to run into you again some time!

And day 27? News program, demo at cool store, but the real news? Seth is back on board and with us through to nationals! We might or might not have a box of Mongu Hoodies. Maybe, who knows, it’s just one of those silly rumors.

Next up? Looooooooooooooooooong drive to Colorado.

Wow, when Nate rolled into Indy it was the most west he had ever been!  They spent three full days in Indy and I tried to cram as much stuff in as possible.  Here’s the proof!

Special thanks to Connor Ebbinghouse and Bradd Collins for hanging out with us

Also, remember this picture?  It’s pretty awesome, I know.  THANK YOU ISHPHOTO.COM

We all jumped and extended our poses as best we could, but Emil definitely went beyond the call of duty. This is the result from that jump.

OH!