The club invites jugglers from many backgrounds — from professionals to beginners — to come and practice club passing with a partner or get some tips from more experienced jugglers.

The MC Juggling Club has been around since 1991, when it was known as the Mount Clemens Juggling Club. Member John Stamey said he first joined the juggling club in 1997.

“I bought one of those ‘Juggling for the Complete Klutz’ books,” Stamey said.

Stamey started out learning the “three ball cascade,” the most basic juggling pattern. He said after you master that, you can try to juggle more objects, different objects like clubs or put tricks into the patterns.

“The patterns can get as complicated as you want to make them,” he said.

The jugglers all say that the most important thing about learning to juggle is perseverance.

Juggling can also involve telling jokes like Jim Oakley does. He said he comes to the juggling club to help keep him sharp in his juggling, which he does as part of a show he does for activities like corporate events.

In his act, Oakley juggles some very unusual objects, including a soccer ball, a plunger and an axe with a loosely attached axe head.

“The whole thing, including threatening the audience, takes about 45 minutes,” Oakley said.

Oakley’s been coming to the Motor City Juggling Club since January, but he used to have his own juggling club in Troy 27 years ago.

“It’s the best job in the world,” he said. He promotes his act through his website, www.jimoakley.com.

But as long as Oakley has been juggling, he said he’s still impressed by 14-year-old Justin Finkel, who has been juggling for four years and coming to the Motor City Juggling Club for about two.

Finkel’s time at the juggling club was spent practicing seven-ball cascades, mid-throw pirouettes and difficult club juggling, which involved passing a club under either leg as he hopped from one foot to the other.

Finkel is currently performing with his juggling mentor, but he said he doesn’t think he’ll make a career out of it.

“It started with his 4th grade teacher,” said David Finkel, Finkel’s father.

He said that there was a demonstration in his class one day about juggling. “Justin just picked it up and ran with it.”

Though he doesn’t juggle himself, David Finkel said that juggling is wonderful exercise and great for conditioning concentration. He can do a three-ball cascade, which he said just proves that anyone can do it.

But mostly, he said he enjoys watching the jugglers when he brings his son to the juggling club meetings.

On the other end of the spectrum, 73-year-old Peter Valente is just beginning to learn juggling.

“I’ve read a lot of articles on juggling on the Internet, and they say that older people that start juggling develop more neurons than young people,” Valente said.

Valente, who has been going to the MC Juggling Club for a couple of weeks, is learning to do his three-ball cascade, and Oakley said he’s seen improvement in his juggling even over such a short time.

Valente has another reason for learning to juggle as well: He has grandkids. He said when he gets better at it, he plans to put on a show for them and impress them.

“Come and see me in about a month. I’ll be very pro-ish,” he said.

One reason many jugglers come to the juggling club is because they can practice maneuvers like club passing, where two or more jugglers throw clubs back and forth to each other.

Phil Atkins practiced a four person club pass, as well as a “takeout,” where someone will stand in the middle of a club pass, grab a club out of mid-air and hand it to the proper juggler. One of the more complicated takeout patterns the members did was called “Train to Nowhere.”

“It’s all about flying objects and head injuries,” Atkins joked.

The club invited anyone interested in improving his or her juggling, or curious about it to come and join. For more information, visit www.mcjugglers.org.

Juggling Club, at one of the club’s meetings at Oakland University.