"The safety precautions that we take are just hours and hours of practice, a lot of repetition."
If you're a Wallenda, you join the circus. That's just how it goes.
"For us, it's quite normal," said Tino Wallenda, 66. "It's what my family did before me and their family before them."
Wallenda, along with his children, their spouses and his grandchildren, exhibited the family's trademark tightrope skills Thursday at the opening day of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, part of which is devoted this year to a celebration of the circus arts. Equipped with balance poles and decades of experience, the performers took turns walking a high wire set up on the National Mall, finishing with a three-person chair pyramid.
Circuses may be an endangered species, as evidenced by Ringling Brothers going out of business this spring, but Wallenda doesn't plan to change a thing about his family's old-school act.
Read more from the Washington Post.