Lor of the Ring: NY Hula Hooper Immortalizes the Hula Hoop in New Novel

By Samantha Kennedy

Brooklyn - New York City veteran hula hooper Alexander Nixon, a.k.a. Xander Nixon, a.k.a. Puck, has immortalized the hula-hoop in his new fantasy novel, which was inspired by his Peace Corps service (Guatemala, 2010).

In addition to celebrating the publication of his first novel, Nixon is celebrating a decade of hula hooping.

Nixon’s hooping voyage began on New Year’s Eve, 2004, at the closing of Ian Schrager’s Gramercy Hotel. Nixon says he remembers two things clearly from that night. First, the beautiful lead singer singing, “Pussy, pussy, pussy, marijuana,” in reference to the lead singer of the Brazilian Girls, who performed their famous new song at the party. Second, hula-hoops.

“Stefan and the other Groovehoops were like colorful creatures from another solar system. I wanted to beam up to the mothership with them.”

“My parents were in the circus in Sarasota, FL,” Nixon explains. “That’s how they met, my dad hurling my mom through the air.”

“[The Groovehoopers] blew my mind. I asked around and found out about the Monday night Groovehoops classes at the YMCA and showed up at the next class. I used my new hooping skills the following spring in Blunt Theatre’s Burning Man-inspired version of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” performed in a magical urban garden called La Plaza Cultural, located in Alphabet City, East Village. The magic from that summer still hasn’t worn off.”

If anything, the magic appears to have multiplied.

Ten years later, Nixon is still finding inspirational ways to incorporate his hula hooping into other endeavors. In The Rise of Apassionéa, Nixon transformed the hula-hoop into a magical weapon, and wielding a “Ring Sword,” into a lost ancient art that was practiced by the inhabitants of a lost civilization.

Do not let the name Ring Sword fool you. Nixon’s magical weapon has no sharp edges to speak of.

The story’s protagonist, a blue butterfly riding warrior-turned-emissary who goes by Lor, dismembers and disarms his victims by channeling his physical momentum into the weapon, which then amplifies Lor’s momentum, with deadly results.

Already way cooler than a mere Light Saber, the Ring Sword bestows a warrior with additional gravity-defying strength and agility, provided he or she does not let go of the blade.

Nixon compares the Ring Sword to a super-gyroscope.

According to one blogger, named Justine Vanderbilt, “his novel moves like a gyroscope as well.”

“Apassionéa” is really two stories rolled into one. A flashback from the near present to Guatemala, where the “author” met a man named Don Ixmatá, a co-worker, who told the author, what [Ixmatá] liked to call, “the bedtime stories of a thousand generations of Mayans.”

“[Ixmatá] was obsessed with the end of the world,” Nixon states.

This was back before 2012.

If you want to know what happened with Ixmatá and what his stories brought to bear on the end of the world, Nixon says, “You have to buy the book.”