Halloween 2023 will mark my twentieth year atop stilts. It's a mind-blowing milestone, even for someone who's spent most of his adult life looking down on people. It's wild that I even arrived here. I didn't grow up in a family of sideshow performers. Kumquat me went to a circus once, but I'm not even sure I encountered a stiltwalker before becoming one myself. So how did I end up on height enhancements? Make yourself comfy, it's story time.
If what's left of my memory serves, it's early 2003. I'm occupying dancefloor real estate at a Denver club when Jennifer Avalon scouts me for a dance team she's assembling. Kevin Larson's Rise Nightclub opens a few months later, and I'm shaking my peach alongside breakers, poppers and go-gos. I finance my Burning Man ticket with the money I make dancing four or five consecutive nights. Halloween creeps up. Jenn pops a question that radically changes my worldview, “So, do you wanna get on the stilts tonight?” Life begins outside your comfort zone, right? I say yes and strap on the drywall stilts stashed in the green room closet. I spend most of that maiden voyage fondling the walls (emotional support architecture?). Spoiler alert: I don't die.
Twenty years ago, there weren't many stilt performers in Denver. So I get other gigs here and there. In 2005, I get cast in a circus show at Six Flags Elitch Gardens. The show runs nearly every summer night, so I enlist an understudy from the Rise team: Nate Leite. Veteran fire dancer Melinda Rivers teaches us some rudimentary fire spinning for the role. Inspired by Dark Crystal Landstriders and Broadway Lion King giraffes, Nate proposes a four-legged stilt creature the following year and lands the lead stilt role. I become Nate's understudy and we start walking on all fours via modified crutches and jumping stilts. At one point in the show's choreography, we even carry one of the dancers on our backs for a short distance.
The intervening seventeen years have been unquestionably elevated by countless high points.
— Cosplaying characters like Buddy the Elf, Jack Skellington, the Mad Hatter, Slender Man and the White Rabbit
— Performing with world-renowned EDM artists like Kaskade and Deadmau5 – the latter straddled my saddle backstage at Miami’s Ultra Music Festival – and bouncing around the court of current NBA champs The Denver Nuggets
— Strapping on height enhancements in Canada, China, Costa Rica, India, Japan, Mexico and all over the U.S.
— Auditioning for America's Got Talent and nearly stilting in a Stephen King-inspired TV show
— Filming an EDC China festival trailer in Shanghai and an iPad ad in New York (after discreetly peeing on a tree backstage:)
— Greeting Cirque du Soleil fans - astride a tall bike - at opening night of Luzia’s Denver run
— Walking in NYC Pride Parade two days after Supreme Court green-lights gay marriage
— Dancing the Electric Slide, hoisting babies in the air, juggling fruit, hula hooping and making hermaphroditic mermaids out of orange peels
— Landing on front pages of publications including Aspen Times, The Denver Post, El Universal, Instagram and Vail Daily and appearing in Atlanta Magazine, High Times, LA Weekly, KMGH, and The Washington Post
What a long, strange...stilt walkers generally sidestep the next word in that well-known Jerry Garcia quote. Halloween — and my twentieth stiltversary — is creeping up. How and where should I celebrate my milestone? Follow me on IG @orangepeelmoses and comment below - I’m gifting a stilt performance to the person with the winningest answer (travel expenses excluded).
Images: Bennett Sell-Kline / Insomniac Events, Jonathan Shoup, Laura Jenkins, Jess (Bernstein) Gallo, David Gaston, Insomniac Events, Morrison Leary & Left Hand Brewing
