Take a look at @kenobi_65’s video in the post just before yours. Those look like ordinary flat ceramic dinner plates. Though, the sticks are pointed at the ends, so I wouldn’t be surprised if maybe the plates had tiny indentations underneath in the center to accommodate the points of the sticks. There are a couple “from below” shots of the underneath side of the plates, and it looks like they are completely smooth underneath, but the video is too low-quality to really tell. It would just require a very small divot carefully made with a chisel or a drill, I imagine.
I actually had this comic:
Definitely. I used to watch Erich Brenn on Ed Sullivan.
It was years before I found out that “Plate-Spinning Music” was actually the “Sabre Dance” from Aram Khachaturian’s Gayane.
He’s clearly lining up each plate with something, so I’m guessing there’s an indentation or something of the sort below the plate. I can’t see how a pointy stick would allow that amount of tilt on the plates before sliding off. In some of the shots, it even looks like some of the plates are stopped, but that’s probably just the low video quality and lack of being able to see any marking on the plate to track whether it’s spinning or not.
Take a look at this site I linked to in post #37, which explicitly shows such a “gimmicked” spinning plate with a socket for the stick that slides around the plate foot on a ballbearing setup.
Those are the Chinese spinning plates used in a different kind of act. I think the routine we’re most familiar with uses plates with an indentation to fit on a point at the top of the rod. Some of the plates have a larger concave shape underneath allowing them to appear to be wobbly but I think they still have a CG below the top of the rod. Somebody might be using that ball bearing type of dish now, but the more common act in this country goes back to vaudeville or even further back in time and likely didn’t employ ball bearings.
So, was this ever done with regular plates, or have they always been trick plates?
Beyond TV plate-spinners, I associate the metaphor with a passage in John D. MacDonald’s *Dress Her In Indigo", in reference to T. Harlan Bowie’s spinning plates:
“Maybe any complex and demanding life in our highly structured culture is like that old juggling routine in which a line of flexible wands as long as pool cues is fastened to a long narrow table and the juggler-clown goes down the line, starting a big white dinner plate spinning atop each one, accelerating the spin by waggling the wand. By the time he gets the last one spinning, the first one has slowed to a dangerous, sloppy wobble, and so he races back and waggles the wand frantically and gets it up to speed. Then the third one needs attention, then the second, the fifth, the eighth, and the little man runs back and forth staring up in horrid anxiety, keeping them all going, and always on the verge of progressive disaster.”
“So Mr. Bowie’s white spinning plates had been labeled Vice President and Trust Officer of a large Miami bank, Homeowner, Pillar of the Community, Husband of Liz, Director of This and That, Board Member of The Other, Father of Beatrice known as Bix, the lovely daughter and only child.”
“He kept the plates spinning nicely, and I imagine he expected to eventually take them off the wands and put them down, with each deletion simplifying the task that remained, until maybe there would be just one plate called Sunset Years, placidly spinning.”
Unfortunately it didn’t work out that way.