The Man Who Walked Between the Towers- Mordicai Gerstein

In my adult life I have found that I come late to all sorts of cultural knowledge that other people knew about/saw/read/listened to years ago. I've come to accept that through a combination of a conservative upbringing, an adolescence spent dancing 5-6 days a week for years on end and by simply having inclinations to pick up TIME over People or The New Yorker over Cosmopolitan, there is a lot I've missed out on over the years. I'm not talking about simply not having heard of Adele until a few weeks ago or not having ever watched a full episode of Modern Family (both of which are true for me), but I'm talking about never having seen an episode of the Smurfs, having no recognition of who actors and actresses like Goldie Han, Kate Hudson and Robert De Niro are and what movies they might have been in, and never having seen the Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer claymation Christmas special or any other claymation or cartoon Christmas special for that matter. The list of my cultural unknowns is endless and glaring when I'm with anyone other than my husband or close friends.

All this is to say that it may come as no surprise to you then that I had never heard of Philippe Petit's walk on a wire between the World Trade Center towers on August 7, 1974 before reading the children's book The Man Who Walked Between the Towers by Mordicai Gerstein. Inspired by the story and the illustrations of this book, I was spurred to learn more about this Philippe and his incredible act. Tonight, thank to the luxury of being finished with classes for the semester, I watched Man on Wire, an Academy Award winning documentary about Philippe's previous walks between the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral, the pillars of Sydney Harbour Bridge and most notably, the Twin Towers. As I watched the documentary, I was of course struck by the madness of it all, but I couldn't help but smile at Philippe the artist, a man who when asked why he spent 45 minutes a quarter of a mile in the air above Manhattan risking his life on a wire answered, "There is no why". In the documentary he spoke of this saying, "That was a very, again, in my way of seeing America, a very American finger-snapping question. I did something magnificent and mysterious, and I got a practical, 'Why?'. And the beauty of it is that I didn't have any why". As rational and practical as I can so often be, I love being reminded of all the years I spent growing up in the dance studio under the tutelage of instructors pushing me and my peers to create art through dance that was beautiful because of its excellence and because it was life in motion. Everyone has the potential to make something beautiful of his or her life, and I thoroughly enjoyed learning about Philippe's efforts to do just that. I put Petit's book To Reach the Clouds on hold at the library to explore his story a little further. If you were born after 1974 and haven't learned much about this event, check out the trailer for Man on Wire below.