Change Is a Circus

Any change agent who's worthy of the name has harbored a dream of running away to the circus -- of escaping from the workaday world and taking on a new persona as a flier or a tumbler or an acrobat. And thanks to the San Francisco School of Circus Arts, Silicon Valley's real-deal risk takers can run away and join the circus, if just for a few hours a week. Walk into the boys' gym of the old Polytechnic High School in San Francisco's lower Haight, and there it is, the only full-time circus school in the country that's open to the public. Circus Arts is an off-track mecca for business folks who hunger for a different kind of learning experience: one that shows them firsthand how to deal with real fear, react to the unexpected, and plunge into the next challenge. They've learned why the trapeze is the ultimate tool for change agents -- it can take them to a different world.

Which is the reason why I find myself 21 feet above the ground, standing on a platform that's narrower than a skateboard. There's barely enough room for my feet -- my toes curl over the edge. But this pathetic piece of ledge hasn't kept Scott Cameron, head of the trapeze department at Circus Arts, from scampering up the aluminum ladder behind me. I'm about to take my first flight on the trapeze, and Cameron is here to ensure my successful launch.

He examines one of my palms as if he were reading it. "Writer's hands," he clucks. Soft hands that will blister and swell, eventually ruining the fun. Cameron's own hands are a splendid mess: calluses upon calluses and a snapped ligament in one finger.

But it's not my hands I'm worried about. Or even the height. After all, a wall-to-wall net is suspended like a giant hammock about 15 feet below me. I'm also "in lines": A thick harness is wrapped around my waist, to which is clipped a length of rope that's fed through a pulley attached to the ceiling. A spotter on the ground below holds the rope's other end. Should I fall, the spotter will control my descent.

My big fear is that the moment I launch into my swing, I'll dislocate my shoulders -- as well as every other joint between my wrists and ankles -- and unhinge until I'm 20 feet long and I end up flopping on the net like a fish. I think this is probably an irrational fear, but then Cameron tells me that fliers do occasionally dislocate body parts.

Suddenly, I don't feel like I'm about to join the exotic corps of circus performers. Instead, I feel as if I'm stuck in a burning building, getting ready to jump out of a window. I grab the bar and wait for Cameron to say "Hep!" -- trapeze-speak for "Go!"

"Hep!"

I stand there, my toes wrapped in a death grip around the platform's edge, my hands white-knuckled around the bar.

"Let's try it again," says Cameron, his voice pricked with impatience. He doesn't have all day. Students in his "Beginning Trapeze" class wait below, stretching their shoulders and chalking their palms. The weird thing is, I'm not particularly terrified. My body just won't move.

"HEP!"

Head up, chest high, I step into space. A big tug of gravity pulls my feet into another time zone. In a flash, I arc skyward and sing out, "Wheeeeeeee-oh!" But my hands feel as if someone is holding them over an open flame. After a few decades, Cameron yells, "Hep!" and I let go, releasing myself from the torture. Plummeting into the net, I land safely on my back. I can see why the trapeze is the school's most popular class -- for people with palms as tough as horses' hooves.

"The school doesn't get ex-gymnasts," explains the TV-handsome 36-year-old Cameron, once we're back on terra firma. "It gets financial types and people from the computer industry who are looking for a cure to the cubicle -- who want a radical change."

Here, then, are the stories of three gravity-defying change agents. They know that even when the fast-forward world of work starts to feel like a three-ring circus, they'll always land on their feet.

Change Trick: Before You Can Learn to Fly, You Must Learn to Fall

"The first thing to remember," says Christine Shipp, 35, a business developer for Digital Video Art, "is that falling is not the same as failing. Falling is part of the performance. And if you don't want to break your neck, you'd better learn how to fall correctly."

Shipp has been flying twice a week for five years. She's one of those sporty, pony-tailed California blondes about whom the Beach Boys carried on at such length. But she's built herself a tremendous set of shoulders and biceps, which the Beach Boys could have never anticipated.

Like many of the business types who've found their way to Circus Arts, Shipp was turned on to the trapeze during a Club Med vacation that offered flying as one of its off-beach activities.