LOONEY BALOONEY

Balloon animals have been very good to Kimbra Mensch.

“I do believe laughter heals the soul,” said Mensch, who runs a business she dubbed Twisted Balloons. “It’s why I love what I do.”

For the better part of a decade, Mensch, who goes by Texas Twister for her stage name, has been a professional balloon artist. She said she got into balloon twisting eight years ago when she was living in Phoenix. She actually took a class to learn the trade.

“I am an official balloononimist,” she said Monday. Lynda Copy, one of her twisters whose stage name is Looney Balloony chimed in with a joke:

“I thought we were called airogomists,” Copy said. Mensch followed that up with a joke of her own:

“The fact that my diploma is written in crayon doesn’t matter. It’s still valuable to me,” she said.

Anyway, back in Phoenix, Mensch had to practice a lot at home. Her dog quickly learned to hate the squeaky sounds of her trade and would run and hide every time she brought out her belt festooned with yet-to-be-inflated balloons. All of that practice left her with a surplus of balloon animals. Though she hadn’t perfected her art, she’d hand them out to neighborhood kids.

“They were running around with three-legged dogs and one-winged butterflies,” Mensch said with a laugh.

The heat of Arizona, Mensch said, finally got to be too much for her. It drove her north to Alaska, where she continued twisting. She started out twisting balloons at T.G.I. Friday’s in Anchorage. She moved to the Valley and started working parties and corporate events. Now she’s got a handful of twisters working for her and they can be found at Hacienda or IHOP.

She said it took her awhile to find her calling. “I failed a bunch of different businesses and just clicked with the balloons,” she said. Those other businesses included hauling nuclear waste and doing stand-up comedy.

Since coming to balloons, Mensch said she’s had a few failed startups. Once, she said, she tried to start an adult-themed balloon animal business called Twisted Naughty but that ended with her fiancé on stage at Mad Myrna’s wearing a balloon union suit with a balloon trapdoor and a balloon Elmer Fudd hat and carrying a balloon shotgun.

Twisted Naughty never really caught on.

But, she said, balloons are a full-time job for her now. Her twisters are all part-time. And they can do just about anything you can think of. Her business’ brochure contains photos of dresses and bush planes, hula dancers and snake charmers.

A customer hasn’t stumped her yet, she said, though many have tried. She does her homework — renting kids’ movies to design a balloon Wall-E or Mater the tow truck. But sometimes she’s got to make it up as she goes. A boy who was a regular at Gwennie’s Alaska Restaurant in Anchorage made a game out of it — Stump the Twister.

“He said, ‘I want a hamburger,’ and I made him a hamburger out of balloons,” with lettuce, a bun, even a deflated red balloon for the ketchup, Mensch said.

Mensch can be found at public events where she’s made life-size versions of Popeye and Beetle Bailey. Last year at the Alaska State Fair she made a wedding dress and had one of her twisters wear it as they wandered the grounds. For next year’s Fourth of July parade, she said, she wants to make a balloon orca, big enough that it would take two or three people to hold up. She’ll man a super-soaker for the whale’s spout. It’s amazing what a person can make out of balloons, she said. They’ve come a long way.

“It’s not just weenie dogs anymore,” she said.