Greatest of Ease

They arrive dressed in office clothes and quickly change into leggings and T-shirts.

Next, they tape their hands and dust them with chalk. They stretch, sip water or chat, all the while thinking about the thrill to come.

From the ground, they watch a woman ascend a ladder to a narrow platform 25 feet above.

Taking a deep breath, the woman grasps a trapeze bar and swings off the platform, gaining speed and height with each powerful thrust of her legs. At just the right time, she lets go of the bar and falls into a rope net.

“It’s very addictive,” says Cynthia Solomon, a computer graphics technician from Burbank, after her turn on the trapeze. “Once you take that first swing, you’re hooked.”

Solomon and her classmates are students of Richie Gaona, a veteran trapeze performer who trains would-be “fliers” on a rig set up in his Lubao Avenue backyard.

The students--a preschool teacher, television producer/writer, television director and a San Francisco judge (who takes classes whenever he’s in town)--don’t plan to run away and join the circus, Gaona says, but simply want to fly through the air with the greatest of ease.

“People tell me all the time that it is something they always wanted to try,” he says. “People who used to dream about doing it are now doing it.”

Students practice acrobatic techniques, basic flying positions and how to land in the net during the twice weekly, two-hour sessions.

“When I am up there, I am only concentrating on what Richie is saying,” says Lisa Niver, a preschool education therapist from Los Angeles. “It’s pretty scary. It’s a rush.”

Fiona Jackson, a stunt performer from North Hollywood, says flying is “very addictive” and the challenge comes in trying to “conquer something that you don’t know how to do.”

Solomon says she wanted Gaona to teach her to fly because he is “the world’s greatest.”

Gaona, 41, began flying as a 5-year-old with his family, “The Flying Gaonas,” who traveled with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and the Big Apple Circus. Today, he mostly works as a stunt performer in film and television.