*A.J. Rachetta (owner), center - Katia (left), Tracy, Goggles, and Leigh (right)*

When my acting friend Leigh Fought told me about her dream to perform Parkour after watching a James Bond film. The action, rolling, jumping, and daredevil antics always interested her. Leigh also performs many Shakespeare roles, so becoming more comfortable with falling on stage, tumbling into a new position, or twisting her body to fit a particular role in a performance led her to ask me to try Parkour with her. I always accept new sports offers!

In case you don’t know, Parkour is described on Wikipedia as a self-led movement practice in which practitioners use only their bodies' abilities to interact with obstacles in any given environment. With roots in military obstacle-course training and martial arts, parkour includes flipping, running, climbing, swinging, vaulting, jumping, rolling, and whatever else is suitable for a given situation. It involves seeing one's environment in a new way and envisioning the potential to navigate it by moving around, across, through, over, and under its features.

Leigh and I showed up at Rachetta’s Parkour in Baldwinsville, New York, for our trial lesson. We met the owner, A.J. Rachetta, a super-nice guy with ninja moves, and two of his students: “Goggles,” a 1-year student, and Katia, a 13-year student who just completed her PhD. All three helped coach Leigh and me, making it a very comfortable atmosphere for two beginners.

We started by learning to fall front and backward from our knees safely, then moved on to vaulting over varying-size mats, learning to do running front somersaults, and then onto trying to walk across a steel pipe without falling off (luckily it was only inches from the ground), and then hitting the pipes and swinging our bodies off them, jutting our legs into the air. You can see how each of these elements eventually becomes a Parkour routine.

In every sport I’ve tried, the first couple of lessons are simple fundamentals that must be learned in order to advance to higher levels of difficulty. You never perfect a new sport on the first try; you get a taste for whether you like it enough to try it again, and that’s the beauty of being fearless enough to try something new, especially sports.

As we ended our first lesson, Leigh and I agreed we would go back for a couple of “drop-in classes” that cost $25 each to improve some of the skills we liked. She liked walking the steel pipe, and I liked vaulting. If either of us had more time, we’d sign up for their one-fee monthly rate of $80, but we are super-busy 60-year-old James Bond girl dreamers with our heads in the clouds and our feet on the ground in other sports and acting performances.

Leigh and I both thought it was really fun to try. We had exceptional coaches who cared about safety first and encouraged us along the way. We made a couple of new friends who embraced us from the start. I highly recommend trying Parkour if you want to improve your movements in acting, or if you like the concept of jumping over things. Try it at Rachetta’s Parkour and tell them we sent you.

Singing off as James Bond Girls,
Bubbles Boomer (Tracy) and Lioness Wells (Leigh)