greatest of ease

I want us all to wear trapeze costumes! Me, my sister, Mary, Lauren, Felecia and Grace...with the greatest of ease.
Sept 4th, come be our audience.


1859 debut trapeze performance, on a rig with three trapezes, lasted 12 minutes and featured the first midair trapeze somersault. Léotard, whose father, Jean, was a gymnastics instructor, invented not only the trapeze apparatus and technique, but also the garment typically worn while performing on it: the eponymous leotard. Although it is sensible enough not to wear loose or restrictive clothing while performing acrobatics high above the ground, Léotard was apparently just as interested in showing off his muscular physique. Léotard himself called the garment a maillot, the word that would later come to mean “swimsuit” in French. In retrospect, this was an apt term: although there was no safety net during the performance, Léotard had developed his act while practicing on trapezes suspended over a swimming pool.

Léotard was the inspiration for the song “The Flying Trapeze,” written by George Leybourne in 1868. Although I’ve seen at least half a dozen different versions of the lyrics, the chorus goes approximately like this:

He’d fly through the air with the greatest of ease,
That daring young man on the flying trapeze.
His movements were graceful, all girls he could please
And my love he purloined away.