A pleasant roll through the park in The Ball
By ROBERT W. BUTLER
The Kansas City Star
It’s called The Ball, but technically it’s two balls — a big one 9 feet in diameter and a smaller one about 7 feet suspended inside the first.
Both are made of clear plastic and the space between them is inflated.
What you do is crawl inside the inner ball through a porthole, stand up and start walking.
And the ball rolls along with you.
The Ball visited Kansas City this weekend on its coast-to-coast tour of the United States. It’s a publicity stunt on behalf of Disney’s animated movie “Bolt” which comes out Nov. 21.
The film is about a dog crossing the country with a couple of friends — one of them a hamster traveling in a plastic hamster ball.
“We thought it would be cool to travel around American in a human-sized hamster ball,” said Raquel Baldwin, one of The Ball’s handlers.
And that’s how The Ball came to be tooling around the mall in front of Liberty Memorial in Penn Valley Park on a Friday afternoon.
The Ball’s four-person Bolt Across America crew, who are responsible for inflating it with a motorized pump (it takes about 15 minutes) and patching up any leaks, are always on the lookout for stunts they can film and post on www.disney.com/bolt.
For example, in Philadelphia they had The Ball run up the steps in front of the art gallery, just like Rocky.
They had The Ball roll off Chicago pier into Lake Michigan, where it bobbed happily.
In Kansas City The Ball played a game of touch football with some residents on a flat patch of ground near Liberty Memorial. The Ball went out for a pass (literally rolling over a defensive player) and even though the football bounced off it — what did you expect? No arms — it rebounded into the hands of a human player who ran for a touchdown.
Inside the ball Baldwin jumped up and down in a celebratory dance…and the ball bounced along with her.
Your intrepid journalist got in the ball for a jaunt and found it to be a mostly pleasant experience. Because the plastic bubble around you is clear, there’s no sense of claustrophobia.
To move the ball you simply walk. It helps to hold your hands out against the interior of the ball. After a while you settle into a rhythm ... it’s like crawling standing up. Great exercise.
The downside? Well, you’re exercising beneath the noon sun in what is essentially a fishbowl. It gets a tad toasty and humid inside.
The Ball will make appearances at the Renaissance Festival and at the Harvest Fest at the City Market on Saturday, and at the halftime show at Sunday’s Wizards game.
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