SUBMITTED photo -- Book Kennison juggles and does his share of pratfalls.

I spoke to Book Kennison, 19, last Wednesday morning. Several hours earlier he had arrived in Salt Lake City at 1 a.m. after a two-day train ride from Portland, Ore.

"The train just rocks you to sleep," he says.

The train he rides is special. It's a mile long and includes cars for Bengal tigers and Asian elephants.

While Book's friends at St. Charles West High School worked on college applications, he kept juggling and dreaming of a job with "The Greatest Show on Earth." Now he's living that dream. Book is a clown with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

"I kind of put all my eggs in this basket and so far it's working out," he says. "I did not want to go to college right away, if at all. I wanted to be an entertainer, and I wanted to get started."

Book and the rest of the circus will be at the Scottrade Center in St. Louis Oct. 15-18. The show made its debut, as did Book, in the spring at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Book is one of 13 clowns in what's called Clown Alley.

"I'm easy to spot," Book says. "I wear a bright green suit jacket and I'm tall and gangly." (He is 6 foot 3 and 150 pounds.)

"He seems to love it," says his mother, Renee. "It makes him happy, so I'm feeling pretty good about it."

Book graduated in 2008 from St. Charles West, where he was a founding member of the Parking Lot Dance Club. "It was short-lived," he says. "We listened to hip hop in the parking lot after school. There wasn't really any dancing. It failed to attract any girls."

As a clown, his specialty is contorting while juggling. For example, he can bend an arm behind his back to juggle. He also does his share of pratfalls, with a dash of dancing.

"In any skill, it's not really what you do but how you present it," he says.

"I like performing and having a chance to do that full time," he says. "I like meeting people from all over the world. There are Brazilians, Russians, Chinese. Most of the dancers are Brazilian."

The circus was in California most of the summer, with a stay at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. There's usually time for sightseeing, he says, although on Wednesday, after talking to me, he went to see two movies in Salt Lake City: "Inglorious Basterds" and "District 9."

Book vaguely recalls the first time he saw the circus. He went with his grandmother and remembers two things: riding the MetroLink to get there and seeing a motorcycle upside down on the high wire.

Book grew up in St. Charles. He first juggled at about age 9. He learned from his father, Richard, once a professional juggler. Richard teaches circus arts.

"My son is also critically shy, and juggling sort of took him out of that," Richard says. "He did his first show when he was about 10 and he got a little money and a little light bulb went off that this was kind of a cool thing."

Within a few years, Richard says, his son did 700 shows at the City Museum in St. Louis. "In that time frame he went from a shy boy to a performer."

According to Book, "I'm still kind of shy."

Nevertheless, in 2004 he appeared in the Stupid Human Tricks segment on "Late Night with David Letterman." Two years later he was on the "Tonight Show with Jay Leno."

This is not the first time Book has lived away from home. Starting with the summer before his freshman year of high school, he was a member of Circus Smirkus, a troupe of 30 teenage entertainers.

The group trained and rehearsed for three weeks in Vermont, then toured the Northeast during the summer. The performances were "mud shows," meaning the tent went up rain or shine and the ground often was muddy. The shows were organized by nonprofit groups, and families with those groups hosted performers in their homes.

"We would stay in people's houses like exchange students," Book says. "It was really cool. And cool of my parents to let me go."

It was not so easy, says his mother, especially that first summer when Book was only 14.

Book says circus life is hard work. First, there are about 500 shows a year. On some days there are as many as three shows. In addition, he juggles daily. "I want to get better, and juggling is something you have to maintain, and practicing every day usually helps. And it's sort of meditation."

Book views the circus as a long-term career. Clowning isn't just a young man's passion, he says. One of the clowns in Clown Alley just turned 37.

"If you rise through the circus world and become well known and do your own feature act, you can make a comfortable living," he says. "I can afford everything I need, and I'm doing all right for just being out of high school."

Steve Pokin is a columnist for the Suburban Journals. He can be reached at spokin@yourjournal.com or by phone at 636-946-6111, ext. 239. An audio version of the column is on the Journal Web site, under videos, at suburbanjournals.stltoday.com/stcharles.