“My big break,” says Galen Kingross, “came when they put me in charge of cotton candy.” Kingross works concessions at Cirque du Soleil, but his “big break” brought him a step closer to what he wants to do: work the crowd.
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Then last year a girlfriend took him to see Cirque du Soleil when it played in San Francisco: “I was totally blown away.” When it traveled south to San Jose, he joined up. Now, four cities later and half a continent away from home, he’s still following the circus, working as one of the 150 temporary laborers Cirque du Soleil hires in each new city it visits but hoping someday to cut capers under the big top.
“I could always do things that other kids couldn’t,” says Kingross. “I always did little tricks. That’s how I made friends a lot of the time–I did little tricks.”
Oh? At what?
Just how does one catch an arrow?
“It’d stick into you, I guess. I don’t know, I never had it stick me.”
In New York, Kingross found “a new thing to play on,” a railing on a boardwalk along the Hudson River.
