Her first tightwire contract, in 1995, was with the Pan-Twilight Circus in Rhode Island. In her act, "I was already dancing and jumping, but it was nowhere near as polished as it is now," Saudek says. Since then, she has been featured with the Montreal-based Cirque Eloize and has toured with Cirque du Soleil's Hong Kong and Japan tour of its show "Alegria." In 1998, Saudek won a silver medal at the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain in Paris. She spent last spring and summer at the Tiger Palast in Frankfurt, Germany, "working in a tiny little room, where they can see you sweat. You can't fool them. Everybody has a plastic smile to put on, but it doesn't fool the audience. They can tell.

"Seven minutes is a long time to have 2,000 people looking only at you. My first responsibility is to myself—to give everything I have, to say I've lived. But also in that time, you want to touch the audience aesthetically, to challenge them. People are jaded. The attitude is, 'Show me something I haven't seen.' I don't go on stage to prove something to my audience. What's challenging is to be as real as you can, twice a day, every day."

Her own act "is still a work in progress," Saudek says, and she is getting used to American audiences for the first time, having spent most of her circus life outside this country. "People aren't as used to live performance here," she says. "Because of the circular seating in the Big Apple, the audience is required to be more open to the performers than if you're in more of a theater setting like the Cirque du Soleil. People here seem to want to be anonymous—even moving a spotlight around so that it illuminates their faces seems to make some people uncomfortable."

Saudek loves being around the animals, especially the elephants, and she's found caravan life liberating, because it gives her a feeling of self-containment. If she's hungry, she pulls off the road into a rest area, "de-duct-tapes the refrigerator door," and eats what she wants. "Most people when they travel don't take the essentials of life, but in a caravan, you have your whole life with you."

In her spare time, Saudek reads voraciously, both fiction and nonfiction. She rents videos occasionally and plays lots of music—"all kinds," she says, "but jazz and flamenco are my favorites"—on the small stereo in her caravan. Had she gone to college instead of circus school, she's not sure what she would have studied: "philosophy ... or anthropology ... or English literature." Pulled in so many directions, she thinks it's a good thing she didn't enroll in college at the time. "But I can certainly see myself in some academic setting in my life—not in a freshman class with a group of 18-year-olds, but in some adult setting."

Life on the road gets lonely at times, especially for a young single woman. "You keep your chin up," Saudek says. "The trick is to find a good balance between keeping your own space and integrating into the community. When I do feel lonely, I find lots of support from the company." But when the season is over, she'll move on. Already, she's considering several contract offers from other shows. Her only firm plan when the Big Apple season ends is "to climb Machu Picchu with my mother."

"I don't get all torn up and emotional when it's over," Saudek says. "I expect I'll cross paths with some of these people again. In the circus, you don't have 20 years to get to know somebody; you have to figure out immediately what this person can teach you, because you may not have another chance. In this business, I feel very aware of the need to seize the moment."

—Sally West Johnson

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Sally West Johnson is the editor of Vermont Sunday Magazine. New Englanders can catch Molly's act this summer when the Big Apple Circus returns to New England. This article reprinted courtesy of The Boston Globe.