Launching Pad : Recreation: Dozens of jugglers turn out at Valley College each Thursday night to practice, swap tips and have a good time.

In a drab-green postwar Quonset hut at Valley College, the law of gravity had been temporarily amended.

People and most other masses heavier than air remained anchored to the building’s scuffed wooden floor, but rings, clubs and balls of all types soared in odd elliptical orbits, dozens of them seeming to hover at the top of colorful arcs in the harsh white light.

Wearing no makeup or costumes, and lacking any musical accompaniment or pretense, about 35 jugglers, some of whom reign as royalty in this hypnotically moving world, casually conversed while keeping as many as eight rings or five volleyballs or four clubs aloft.

Among those holding court recently at one of these informal Thursday night gatherings were some of the nation’s best jugglers. To some they are worthy of titles: Mark Nizer, the Wooden Club King; Dan Bennett, the Ball King, and Bob Mendelson, the Ring King.

At one point, Mendelson and Nizer each were tossing eight rings--the world record for sustained juggling is nine--standing back to back.

Suddenly, Mendelson, demonstrating that hubris is innate to juggling, shouted, “Let’s meld!” Instead, the rings landed in a humiliating heap at their feet.

Later, Mendelson, Nizer and two others tried to complete 35 flawless tosses of six rings, clapping them over their heads at the end in a staccato flourish. Each time someone flubbed--and there were plenty of flubs--they all started over.

“Ten years ago, we would have been gods doing this, but now there’s a couple hundred who can,” said Mendelson, who lives in West Los Angeles.

For about two hours each week the room fills with jugglers, some chapter members of the local International Juggling Assn., and others just curious or beginners.

Some are novices learning the mysteries of keeping three bean bags flying, others professionals looking for a good workout. Most are men, 30-ish and generally sharing an affinity for computers or mathematics, able to see the beauty in a perfect toss or a balanced equation.

They practice on foot or unicycles, tossing and jamming, challenging one another to juggle more objects higher and faster. They play catch with three-pound wooden clubs that come whirling like primitive weapons. They call it hacking, but most would call it miraculous. Meanwhile, they trade tips about jobs and agents and they trade jibes.

“How hard can that be?” Bennett said, watching Mendelson finish a six-ring routine with a fancy flourish. So he tried it himself and ended up chasing an errant ring across the floor. “That’s hard,” he concluded.

Thanks to the entertainment industry, as well as good weather and outdoor venues such as Venice Beach, Los Angeles has one of the largest populations of working jugglers of any city in the nation. And, depending on the week, those who unpack their equipment at the Thursday night sessions, which the college has sponsored for the past 15 years as part of its community service program, arguably represent the greatest concentration of juggling talent in the country.

“It’s inspiring to work with other people like that,” said Nizer, a 31-year-old Sylmar resident who was IJA’s 1990 individual champion. Now he performs about four months of the year, working at college campuses and on cruise ships and opening for entertainers including Bob Hope and George Burns.

“You can be in the gym all week practicing and tell yourself you have to do 100 of these . . . but it pushes you more with other people around,” he said. Besides, “everyone has a trick we can learn something from.”

“Except for Dan,” Nizer says in the direction of Dan Holtzman, 31, who finished third in the 1990 championship.

Holtzman, who is slicing the air with five rings, good-naturedly discounts his rival’s technique. “Nice outfit, though,” he concedes, tongue in cheek.

The weekly workouts are “mostly . . . socializing and a chance to do some practicing,” said Holtzman, a 31-year-old Sherman Oaks resident who also counts among his juggling honors a world IJA team prize for an act that called itself the Raspini Brothers.

When Holtzman first attended one of the Valley College sessions about eight years ago he had never met another juggler and his equipment bag contained only three unripe oranges (they last longer than ripe ones). Now he lugs around rings, balls, clubs and golf clubs and he has performed on “The Tonight Show” (when Johnny Carson was still the man; Jay Leno apparently doesn’t care for jugglers) and for Ronald Reagan in the White House. He still drops by Van Nuys whenever he’s not on the road.

On this particular night, about half a dozen of the jugglers in attendance support themselves solely with their mesmerizing feats of hand-eye coordination, some earning six-figure incomes. The best jobs are at colleges, on cruise ships and in theaters. A rung below those are corporate events, gigs at comedy clubs and street performing. Others tour Europe and Asia, on their own as well as with theater and circus companies.

But the recession has hit jugglers hard, landing like a dropped bowling ball. “Companies used to do company picnics and hire jugglers, and they’re cutting back, and when you’re doing the streets now people aren’t able to give you that extra dollar,” said Suzy Williams, a 28-year-old Santa Barbara resident.

Although the professional jugglers in the group often compete for the same jobs, there is a camaraderie among them here. They gossip about other performers, dismiss as a silly stunt the street performers who use knives or chain saws in their acts and, after a rather rigorous two-hour workout, almost everyone, klutz and king alike, goes out for coffee and a snack.

Unlike magicians, who guard their tricks like state secrets, they show each other their stuff, holding only a little something, a signature routine, in reserve.

Dan Bennett, for example, a UCLA math Ph.D. candidate who traded in juggling equations for juggling objects, patiently helps another performer learn to juggle five volleyballs. (The tough part--for him, at least--is holding all of them at once at the beginning and catching them at the end.)

But he doesn’t demonstrate his unique skill of tossing a bowling ball into the air with his foot and catching it on his face. (The trick is to catch it at the top of its arc, but don’t try this at home.)

For Traci Burwell, 27, the sessions go beyond socializing and practice. They are almost a lifeline to a former self.

Nearly three years ago the Northridge resident was polishing a comedy-juggling act when a grinding four-vehicle traffic accident with a tractor-trailer truck left her in a coma for four months. When she regained consciousness she had lost the ability to speak or walk and was blind in her right eye.

But she hadn’t lost the desire to juggle. Now, she not only talks and walks, she can do both while sustaining a three-ball cascade. “I got a lot of support from everyone here,” she said of the jugglers who visited her in the hospital and who now are helping her learn to compensate for the lack of depth perception caused by the vision loss.

She’s juggling clubs again, catching balls after tossing them over her shoulder and still trying to keep four balls in the air. “It’s enjoyable when it doesn’t feel like work,” she said at the end of several successful passes.

The semiofficial leader of the juggling club, one of 63 IJA chapters in the nation, is Bud Markowitz, a 72-year-old retired Cheviot Hills tie manufacturer who first took up the balls at the age of 64. On his first visit to the gymnasium eight years ago, he was so awe-struck by the talents of the others, he was too embarrassed to get off the bleachers. He was determined, however, to overcome his nervousness.

Now he can pass clubs back and forth to a partner and is working on juggling three balls--in one hand. “If anyone wants to come to learn, we’ll be happy to teach them,” Markowitz said. “We’re not like a magician who won’t tell you a damn thing. We all want to help and want more and more people to join the fraternity.”

Markowitz said juggling has kept him young and even improved his eyesight. But it’s also paid off in another way. The producer of the recent movie “Frankie and Johnny” saw him stand up and start juggling at halftime of a Raiders football game and decided to give him a part as a regular customer of the diner where Al Pacino’s and Michelle Pfeiffer’s characters work.

Now he’s scheduled to appear in another movie. And, he said, his wife no longer thinks his obsession is silly.

As the night began to wane, as more and more of the amateur jugglers sat down to watch the best of the best push each other a little harder to perform some of the art’s most difficult tricks, one regular attendee commented on the almost surreal scene in the dull Quonset hut.

“It’s a little bit magical,” he said, as the Ring King, Ball King and others worked themselves into a frenzy. “There’s no signs, nothing to help you find it. You just find the open door with a light on inside and there they are.”