First of all, they’re not really brothers. They have, nonetheless, known each other for an awfully long time. The story goes that they met in 1982 during a snowball juggling contest inside a late-night laundromat in Spencerport, NY.
Finding a certain affinity in outlook and talent, they made their own juggling clubs out of clorox bottles and broom handles and taught themselves to pass in tandem. Joel and Dan attended their first juggling convention at the Rochester Institute of Technology and first passed clubs with their Jedi master, Greg Moss. They never looked back. One of their very first performances together, was at the Corn Hill Arts Festival in Rochester, NY in the summer of 1983. There, Joel met Tobi, a juggler from R.I.T., and fell in love.
Dan married his high school sweetheart, Anne Marie Zavacki, a molecular biologist who does research on thyroid hormones at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Dan and Ann have two kids, Andrew, 9, and Adam, 7, and live in Norwood, MA. Joel and Tobi have two kids, Jesse (14) and Lily (12) and live in Amherst, MA. Joel works part time as an environmental scientist (geologist) in Springfield, MA.