I wrote to Richard with a question about Zev Luz, a name I discovered on his bubbles.org in reference to an appearance by Luz at an Exploratorium Bubble Festival. Also, knowing that Richard is now very busy as a full time photographer in Las Vegas, I was happy to read more about what bubbles have meant to him, and still mean to him today. I will also note that Mr. Faverty had once, as a photographic assignment, the job of shooting Eiffel Plasterer!
What follows is his reply to my questions. Enjoy!
Keith,
I have not seen or heard from Zev Luz since I was in Israel in 1986. We had met at the Exploratorium the previous year. He saw that I was performing in Tel Aviv and invited me and my wife to come visit him and stay at his home over night in Rehovat. He was, at the time, the head of the Chemistry dept. at the Weitzman Institute. He was very gracious to us. I will never forget sitting in his university office with Zev and the head of the physics dept. playing with bubbles. These two brilliant guys knew all about the science of bubbles and were fascinated by the art of bubble performing. Ignorant me... I was soaking up as much technical information as I could comprehend.
Zev and his wife had a dinner party for us that evening. A lot of his chemistry grad students were there. We had a great time and they gave me much valuable information about how to make bubbles work on stage even better.... they explained some natural phenomena's related to humidity and atmospheric pressure that changed the way I worked with bubbles.
As I say, I don't have any idea where Zev Luz is today... but I have wonderful memories of the time I spent with him.
Concerning my interest in bubbles.... I will always continue to be interested in bubbles! I have been to 58 countries performing and have had many, many fantastic life experience which can be attributed to bubbles. My interest in bubbles changed the course of my life and, in fact, brought me to Las Vegas. My experience performing is part of what sets me apart from other photographers and gives me some insight when working with entertainers... which has become my specialty.
I never really had a burning desire to be on stage. I like to meet people and to travel. Travel today has become quite tedious for people like me who carry around 3 - 4 hundred pounds of gear. The money paid to specialty acts is, generally, about half of what it used to be. Here in Las Vegas, for example, acts that used to make $3000 per week are working for $1000 - $1500 per week.... and work is uncertain! I am happier shooting photos and staying in Las Vegas right now!
On top of everything, there is a plethora of bubble acts today. When I started, there was only a handful in the whole world. When I arrived for a month-long job in Singapore a couple of years ago, the booking agent showed me a video tape of another bubble act from Germany that was doing exactly what the client wanted me to do. Seventy percent of the video tape was a direct copy of my own act!
The last time I performed at the Seattle science center, the 24 year girl who was the new head of event booking pointedly said to me "Neither you or Tom Noddy do anything different than any of the other bubble performers we have ever had." I could not argue with her... although the other performers she had seen were all clones, she had seen them first and every other bubble performer just appeared to be a knock off to her. I don't have any problem with all the competition, but I no longer feel that what I have to offer in a bubble act is unique in the same way it was when I started. So, I would hope that if I ever do decide to perform again, I will come up with a new twist to my act.
Well, I have gone on too long....
Good luck with your site. I will put a link to it from my site if you like.
Richard
Thanks to www.exploratorium.edu for use of this photo!
BUBBLE, BUBBLE NO TOIL OR TROUBLE
Philadelphia Daily News (PA)
May 15, 1987
And now, before your very eyes, unaided by any machine, Richard Faverty is going to create a huge . . . I mean an enormous . . . I mean a BIGGER-THAN- A-BATHTUB soap bubble. A soap bubble so big that two humans can stand inside it.
A-MAZING!
Faverty, internationally-known "bubbleologist," will do this neat stunt - and other hard-to-believe bits of bubble bravura at the Franklin Institute's third annual Bubbles and Balloons Festival this weekend.
No doubt you are wondering how Richard Faverty got to be a bubble expert.
"It was an accident," he says modestly.
It seems that Faverty is only a part-time bubble builder. Most of the time, he is a successful Chicago photographer whose photos appear in magazines around the world. It just happens that he likes bubbles . . . that he thinks they are pretty. He thought it would fun to make pictures of bubbles. He had this idea of making a bubble big enough for a person to be inside.
So, back in 1980, he read up on bubbles, mixed up a batch of soapy water, and invited his friends to come by in their bathing suits.
You will understand what happened next if you have ever bought one of those little bottles of bubble-making liquid. They come equipped with a tiny wire hoop, with handle attached. You dip the hoop into the liquid, blow through it - and get bubbles.
Faverty made a wire hoop big enough to surround a body. He'd ask a friend to stand on a platform in the middle of a shallow container of soapy liquid. Then, he'd drop the hoop over the person, down into the liquid and then whip it back up quickly enough to create a draft. And lo! The buddy's body was bundled in a bubble.
"I had several bubble parties," Faverty recalls. "And the pictures I made at them sold everywhere: Italian magazines, Israeli magazines, Arabic and African magazines. I began to get calls asking me how I'd done it. I was asked to appear on TV shows like 'That's Incredible' and 'To Tell the Truth.'
"At first, I turned everybody down. I said 'my job is taking pictures, I'm not in show biz. I don't need it.' But the pictures kept selling and people kept calling. And when a Japanese television station offered to fly both me and my wife to Tokyo if I'd make bubbles on a show there, we went and had a wonderful time. I met a Las Vegas booking agent there who offered to get me jobs elsewhere.
"So, finally, last year, I put together a bubble act. It's taken me to Rome, to Paris, to Santiago, Chile. I toured Israel with a circus."
And now, of course, he's coming to the Franklin Institute!
So expert has Faverty become about bubbles, that, in his how, he now encases two bodies in a bubble at the same time. He does this by lifting the soap-filled hoop over one young volunteer from his audience and then down over another. Sometimes the resulting bubble spans a dozen feet and lasts for 10 seconds. And somtimes, in the process of dividing into two separate round bubbles, it bursts much sooner.
This is how it is with bubbles. You can never be sure how long they will last. Bubbles, says Faverty, are greatly affected by humidity. Dryness will burst your bubble. If your hand is wet, you can handle a bubble, or even put your hand right in the middle of it. But if you touch it with a dry finger, POOF!
Faverty calls his performance "a trained bubble act." He produces rows of bubbles. He blows an eight inch bubble that walks a tightrope ("without a net").
"The best thing about doing bubble tricks," he says, "is that if they don't work the first time, they are easily repeated."
In case you wondered, Faverty's basic solution for bubbles is one part Dawn or Joy dishwashing detergent ("Bubbleologists all over the world say those brands make thicker bubbles"), 10 parts water, and a little glycerine (purchased at the drug store).
Since Faverty makes his bubbles in big batches, he will mix a quart of Dawn, two and a half gallons of water, and a cup of glycerine. He admits he sometimes tinkers with this recipe, using ionized water in some circumstances, using a polyglyceride to make bubbles strong enough to withstand the lights of TV studio. But, normally, the basic formula is fine.
Faverty shows his audiences how to make a hoop out of a coat hanger, how to blow bubbles through your fingers. He says he enjoys sharing his own interest in bubbles with others.
He admits his own two children, daughters ages 11 and 7, are blase about his bubble business. "They think every father blows bubbles, that every house has a backyard where nothing grows." (Soap kills grass and plants.)
Although blowing bubbles may sound like child's play, no kid could do what Faverty does. It takes considerable strength and skill to snap a hoop fast enough to create a double-body bubble. Faverty says he lifts weights to strengthen his wrist and arm for the task.
And when he does a show, he finds that adults are even more thrilled by his bubbles than the kids. Children love to burst bubbles, he says. It is the adults who enjoy seeing them last.
In addition to Faverty, the Franklin Institute's Bubbles and Balloons weekend will feature lecture/demonstrations by David A. Katz, chemistry professor at the Community College of Philadelphia on "The Science of Bubbles and Balloons ("Why do bubbles move the way they do? Why do balloons stretch?"). Bubble-maker David Stein will demonstrate his "Bubble Thing," a device that makes eight foot bubbles. A huge hot air balloon will be inflated in front of the Museum. A pair of balloon clowns will perform and workshops on manipulating balloons into various shapes will be conducted daily. Possibly, somebody will hum "I'm forever blowing bubbles" at some point in the day.
Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA)
May 15, 1987
Article Text:
Take a moment and consider the simple perfection of the soap bubble, an iridescent sphere formed of fine liquid film and - plooff.
Sorry, folks. Let's try this again. What we have here is a soap bubble, truly one of the little marvels of - pffft. Its whimsy captures us as, buoyed on unseen currents, it floats hither and - splattt.
This ephemeral nature of bubbles - their lifespan would horrify even a fruit fly - probably makes them all the more enchanting to us. On the other hand, it also has deterred a lot of people from seriously pursuing them as a career. History books do not teem with the names of great bubblologists or, for that matter, even bad ones. In fact, when Richard Faverty came along, the bubblology field was more or less wide open.
Faverty, like most reasonable adults, never dreamed of becoming an international bubble expert, of performing on the Champs Elysees and Chilean television, as he did recently, or at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, as he will this weekend. A Chicago photographer, he merely wanted to shoot pictures that would sell well through his New York agent. Bubbles seemed a good bet. In the summer of 1980, he started experimenting.
Eschewing store-bought goo and little plastic wands, Faverty mixed up his own industrial-strength suds: one part Dawn dish detergent ("so wonderfully oleaginous!"), 10 parts water and a dash of glycerine for staying power. He then fashioned a wire hoop three feet in diameter (a coat hanger will do for the novice bubblologist) and wound it with cotton string to hold more solution. By dipping the hoop into a large tray, Faverty created mammoth bubbles.
He eventually became so skilled at it that, thanks to friends silly enough to stand in the trays, he could encase people in his bubbles - a feat that, as close as Faverty can figure, was unprecedented in the annals of bubblology. Faverty documented it all with his camera, and when the resulting photos popped up in magazines all over the globe, show biz beckoned.
Hence was launched a weird but indisputably lofty avocation. In the last couple of years alone, he has appeared on Japanese and Italian TV, entertained Parisians, headlined an Israeli circus and a slew of Las Vegas industrial shows, and opened a hotel in Charleston, S.C.
Tomorrow and Sunday, he will bring his Bubble Magic show to the Franklin Institute's third annual Bubbles and Balloons Festival, with performances each day at 12:30, 2 and 3:30 p.m. He'll share the weekend bill with David Stein, creator of the mechanical "Bubble Thing"; David A. Katz, a chemistry professor at the Community College of Philadelphia, who pushes knitting needles through balloons, and the Cunards, a pair of balloon clowns.
Nothing in Faverty's expansive repertoire tops the amazing Double Body Bubble, a tubular arch that spans nearly 12 feet and encloses a person at each end. Although making it can be a sloppy mess, Faverty never lacks for volunteers. "Parents will bring their kids up to be put in bubbles," he says, "but I can see from the look on their faces that they are the ones who want to do it. So I end up letting them stand in the trays. I have more trouble getting the grown-ups out of the bubbles than the children."
Faverty doesn't zealously guard his bubble secrets - a good thing, since we gave most of them away a few paragraphs back. In fact, he advises aspiring bubblologists to work at their craft in a warm, still, humid environment, the sort that follows a summer rain.
"Dryness, not sharpness, is the enemy of the bubble," he warns. "If you have a dry hand and you touch a bubble, the bubble pops. If your hand is wet, you can reach right inside it." Likewise, bits of wind-borne pollution will blow even the most glycerin-fortified bubble to smithereens.
For obvious reasons, Faverty prefers to perform inside. But even there, calamity lurks. Once, while he was appearing at a small TV station, an errant bubble floated into a quartz light, causing it to explode and set the stage on fire - an episode carried on radio simulcast. The blaze was extinguished, the hostess stopped screaming, and Faverty, with everything smoldering around him, "kept on making bubbles." May his passion never be doubted.
Faverty waxes rhapsodic: "In a world of imperfection, this little bubble is so perfect and so easy to make. There is something about it that's absolutely compelling, absolutely universal, absolutely . . ." Plooff.
Bubble-dreaming 'prof' isn't just blowing soap
Chicago Sun-Times
May 9, 1989
When life's strife bursts yours, think of Richard Faverty.
For he is "Professor Bubbles."
"Bubbles," says the man who teaches that there's nothing wrong with pursuing a dream, "are uplifting."
A successful commercial photographer with a Jackson Boulevard studio and a home in Wilmette, Faverty was first smitten by the perfect soapy sphere through the eye of his camera.
His photo specialty at that time, he remembers meekly, was "freaks - you know, the characters of the world, the tallest woman, things like that."
"I caught his enthusiasm. It opened my mind knowing that there is more to life than just making little bubbles in this world," Faverty says. "So I decided to make larger, the biggest bubbles. And I immediately drove to Toys-R-Us and bought a case of solution, went back to my home in Wilmette and dumped out 300 bottles of it into a big vat."
Faverty soon became Professor Bubbles, one of only four bubbleologists in the world, the first man to encase a human in a bubble, to blow bubbles through the straps of lawn chairs, he says.
He has written bubble books, invented bubble toys. His bubble blitz - enormous bubbles, pregnant bubbles, bubbles that walk tightropes - has made its way to stages in Chile, Spain and Japan, Paris, Israel and Rome. Last month he opened his first bubble exhibit at Express Ways Children's Museum at Navy Pier.
"I am coming into a whole new career," he says. "I remember the first show I ever did was in Japan for a very odd variety show . . . acts like the woman with the strongest hair, the woman with the longest fingernails . . . I saw a woman, the tallest woman in the world, whom I had photographed only eight months earlier for magazines. It suddenly dawned on me that I had become what I beheld."
His life, he says, has been enriched by bubbles.
"A lot of people are stuck in crummy jobs," he says. "But I love what I am doing. I have met great people, among them a man who wrote an entire bubble opera, he scored an entire opera with bubbles. I can no longer be shy or embarrassed about the bubbles. I am perfectly and completely content with myself being Professor Bubbles."
Soap bubbles are much like life, he says, and subject to the same pricks. But it is not sharp objects that destroy the beautiful bubbles, it is dryness.
"That is what I love about them," says Faverty. "I can make a beautiful bubble and watch it until it pops. I hate to see it go, but that is the beauty: They are only around for a short time and to enjoy them I have to create them again."
His wife, Lyn, understands his passion, he says.
"I think of bubble inventions in the middle of the night. Instead of worrying that I am not fixing the toilet or repairing a light, she says, `Go to your bubble laboratory, Richard.' I am a fortunate man."
Next, Professor Bubbles hopes to do bubble therapy, traveling about the country holding seminars for the befuddled businessman, the world-weary. "Playing with bubbles is a great form of relaxation, I think it could help people," he says.
Professor Bubbles' solution for life's problems: Three parts liquid Joy and one part water.
"Sure, laugh about Professor Bubbles," he says. "But remember you are not laughing at me, you are laughing with me."
At that, he pops his head from his studio door and his tall top hat spits a stream of architecturally perfect bubbles.
Bubbles inspire free-floating fantasy and joy
Chicago Tribune
July 14, 1992
The subject is frustrated drips.
Meet Professor Bubbles. Yes, he's a real live grown-up. Pays real-estate taxes in Wilmette, Ill. Not quite where you would expect to find a man who makes his living blowing bubbles on stages in Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Las Vegas and beyond. A few years ago, he and his bubbles toured China with a throng of female bodybuilders.
Richard Faverty is his name. He's 47. He backed into the bubble business in 1980, after a decade as a free-lance photographer, shooting for such respectable rags as Time and Newsweek, and for those checkout-line distractors, the National Enquirer and the Star, where he says he developed a specialty as the "freak" photographer, eschewing the mainstay Elvis, JFK or UFO assignments.
He was busy shooting his usual corporate chiefs, newsmakers and "FIVE-OUNCE BABY LIVES!" when a call came from his photo agency in New York, which wanted him to shoot pictures of Americans blowing bubbles. The motivation was strictly mercenary: The agency figured the pictures would sell well worldwide.
So Faverty, a former hippie who spent his college days at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, obliged. He started blowing bubbles. He started throwing bubble parties. Every night after work he would invite his friends and lab assistants to bring their bathing suits to his studio. He cranked the music. He blew bubbles, big bubbles. Then he worked his cameras.
By the end of the summer, he figured out how to put a baby in a bubble. The baby was his 3-year-old daughter, Sandi. This caught the attention of the National Enquirer, which ran Faverty's photo of the baby-swallowing bubble with the screamer: "Dad Wraps Daughter in Amazing Superbubble."
That was just the beginning. "Within months, I became an international bubble expert," says Faverty, who keeps a toy-filled photo studio in a loft. "Say what you want about the Enquirer, but I got 30 calls after that story ran, calls from Hollywood, New York, they wanted me on `What's My Line?' " Faverty turned them all down.
Five years later, he was still taking those pictures. The phone rang with one more offer. This time, Faverty accepted. He was off to Tokyo to appear on a TV show whose name translates to "The World Amazing People 85," a Japanese cross between "Late Night With David Letterman" and a freak show, Faverty explains. He packed his bags with 300 pounds of bubble goop, toys and tricks.
He donned a Dr. Seuss-like stovepipe hat, from which bubbles often blew. He put on a bow tie and tails. He took the stage name Professor Bubbles, inspired by his father, whom he says was a "real professor" of Victorian literature at Northwestern University.
Once in the Orient, he ventured to a prebroadcast banquet to meet the rest of the show's guests: the tallest woman in the world, the oldest woman with tattoos in the world, the man with the longest mustache, the woman with the longest nails, the woman with the strongest head of hair.
He looked up and down the banquet table and realized: "I became what I beheld."
The professor doesn't need to be adrift in another land to get lost in his bubbles. Why, it's right there in his back yard that he blows some of his best. "It's very relaxing. On a summer evening, I put on a little classical music, go outside and start blowing.
"The old neighbors complained, the bubbles would drift over, and every time they popped they left a clean round circle on the side of the house. And when it rains, the neighbors laugh. The patio starts foaming."
