Living with her boyfriend and a dog and enjoying sporadic visits from her 17-year-old-daughter and his 13-year-old daughter, the pair live in a place surrounded by bicycles, bike parts, giant hoops and hoop making materials. How did it all begin for Emily? She explains, "I don't remember the first time I ever used a hula hoop, but that's what I started with, a tiny light pink and white toy hula hoop with beads inside. I just actually gave it away to a little girl that lived next store to me. It took me months to be able to keep the hoop up, but for some reason I was obsessed with it. Then I found the water filled kid hoops and toted one around with me everywhere I went. I had everyone at my jobs, in my family and on my block using them, waist hooping and neck hooping and making up the most ridiculous "hoop routines" with my daughter that looked more like bumper hoops then hoop dancing. I was so into it that people would find hoops at garage sales and in trash piles and dumpsters and bring them to me which resulted in quite a collection of kid-sized toy hoops. Then on my birthday two years ago, YIKES, the company I work for, got me a "big girl" hoop from
hoopgirl.com and I had never seen one before. I didn't even know you could do tricks! I thought not dropping it was the only trick there
was!"

After 6 or 7 years of just waist hooping with a kids hoop, she's been playing with the grown up models for almost two years. Emily reiterates, "I never got into learning tricks until about six months ago, but I am not a dancer or performer or an instructor and I do not aspire to be. I only want to learn a few tricks to impress the chicks and get everyone I can to try hooping."

How often does she hoop? She told Hooping.org, "I don't schedule practice time or work out sessions with the hoop. I only ever pick it up for fun. I do hoop every chance I get, but most of the time I am teaching other people how to hoop. Y'know, the basics, where to put your feet and what to do with your hips. I LOVE seeing people hoop for the first time so usually any time I am hooping I will gladly give it up to someone else when I see their eyes light up like giant saucers. Sometimes no one wants to try, which is very rare, and I end up
not being able to put it down myself and I accidentally learn a trick!"

Has hooping changed Emily's life? She said, "I have heard many stories of the people who have lost weight, thwarted illness, overcome crisis and even reinvented themselves with the hoop. I did all those things as well, but way before I ever picked up a hoop. In my life the hoop was not a catalyst for those things, but a reward for them. So I cant say for sure that hooping has changed my life, but it has added to it and probably kept me out of trouble. In between working one full and one part time job I make and sell hoops online and at
flea markets. I also run my website, learning about the web and doing all the design and programming for it myself. So its pretty obvious that I have a boredom problem and if I didn't have ten jobs and one hundred hoops to make I might be out there somewhere calculating capers and coups that would most likely lead to a not so happy place. It also allows me to help my favorite local charities. My favorite thing is to donate wicked cool hoops to silent auction events! Some of the silent auctions I have donated to are the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Philadelphia Stories, Girls Rock Philly and The Painted Bride Theater and Gallery."

So what is her idea of earthly happiness? She explained, "My vision of a happy earth would include free shows, naps, four day work weeks, warm chocolate chip cookies in bed and people hooping to work instead of driving. It would also mean an end to criminalizing blacks, alienating people from other countries, refusing gays their legal rights and the entire Prison Industrial Complex."

Asking about favorite hoop memories she explained, "I don't have any friends that are actually into hooping, they only do it because I berate and throw things at them until they try it. They all absolutely fall in love with it when they try it, but no one has run off to perform with the circus yet. A most memorable event involving hoops though happened in August. I always fantasize about a world where people are just standing around, walking, riding bikes or riding the subway with giant hoops over their shoulders as naturally as you might lean up against a bike or walk holding a skateboard by the trucks, and then it happened! I drove an hour and a half to sell hoops at the funky flea market in New Jersey, sponsored by glubdub.com and I had to go by myself and was really nervous about it, but my sister Dawn met me there and we ended up having the time of our lives. Every single person, including old people, kids, girls in heals, hippies, hipsters and a couple bands from Finland tried the hoops, for five hours. I snapped a few pictures of people who had never even hooped before just standing in a group talking, holding hoops completely
naturally!"

Emily's favorite hoop is about one inch taller then her belly button, 3/4 inch 160 poly pipe decorated partly in fabric "for super bad ass friction and style and partly covered in orange sparkle tape so that when the light hits me just right it's a disco dance party extravaganza. This hoop is seriously beat up though. And I bet at least two hundred people have hooped with it!" Her favorite music to hoop to lately includes "Shoyoass" by The Coup, "Radio Freq" by Dead Prez, "Not a Substitute" by Jay Reatard and "Heard It Through The Grapevine" by The Slits.

What quality does Emily most admire in a hooper? "I love watching people who have mastered their hooping, either tricks or dancing or fire or poi. But I mostly admire the people out there that suck at hooping and keep doing it anyway because it makes them laugh and feel great. That's always the best time, when people suck and can laugh at themselves."

She also wanted Hooping.org readers to know, "There is my website, Philthyhoops.com where I end up giving away just as many hoops as I sell. I started making hoops because I wanted something that looked a lot different from what I was seeing around. It was also very important to me to come up with something different not only for myself and the actual hoopers, but also for the other hoop
makers. I would never have started selling my hoops online if there was already a market for the ones I was making. I researched what was out there and available and realized that what I was doing was unique and it would be worth it to offer them for sale. The hoops are for sale at two local retail stores: The Flying Saucer in Fairmount Philadelphia, and right off of South Street at the Curiosity Shoppe. I'm also a huge advocate for ending the massive discrimination and overwhelming oppression of formerly incarcerated people and information on that can be found at Critical Resistance.org.

In closing, if Emily had just one piece of advice to share with someone picking up a hoop for the very first time, I asked her what would it be? Her answer: "If you are new to hooping and your lips turn blue as you try, have your blood pressure medicine checked out." And then she laughed.

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More info about Emily Lopizzo can be found at:

Philthyhoops.com

Hula Hoop Heroine