Forty-seven-year-old Luis Munoz says his attractive wife, Vicky, "takes great pleasure" in shooting him out of a huge cannon twice a day. He smiled while setting up the net in the Farnham Dudgeon Civic Center arena Monday afternoon.
Sterling & Reid Bros. Circus calls it the world's largest cannon. It weighs almost 40 tons. Luis' late father made the cannon in 1965. Although he's been fired out of the barrel for almost 20 years, Luis says he's always nervous when showtime arrives.
"I can mess up, or the machinery can mess up," he says. "Immense concentration is a necessity."
He's suffered some injuries through the years, the most serious an ankle fracture last year. His ankle still bothers him some. Backstage, about an hour before Wednesday's first circus performance, Luis was walking with a cane.
The human cannonball part of the show comes at the end of each two-hour performance. Luis is patriotically dressed in red, white and blue. When he enters the arena under the spotlights, the pain and cane disappear.
For more on this story, see the latest State Journal.
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