Monday nights Fire-throwing, bull whips, scoring 800, and arguing with fools and idiots -- that doesn't sound boring at all BY SARA DONNELLY

It is just after 7 p.m. on a recent Monday night in January and Katie Hynes sits on the Reiche Elementary School stage in Portland wondering what to do with herself. Hynes, 23, is taking a break from spinning homemade poi in the air with local fire dancer Marita Kennedy-Castro. Kennedy-Castro is a master of poi, which is an ancient dance prop made of balls attached to the end of flax strings. A handful of other circus performers surround Hynes, hammering out kinks in their various acts — a woman rolls a glass ball from her palm to the back of her hand, a man in a red-striped blazer juggles bean-bag sacks, another man balances expertly on a rope strung between two pillars in the school lobby, and Kennedy-Castro, the flammable ends of her poi snuffed for indoor practice, whips the two ropes around her like a ninja preparing for battle, swaying all the while to the syrupy drumbeat from the stereo beside her. It is Monday night, practice night for the Portland Jugglers and Circus Arts Society (yes, their acronym is JACAS and, no, this is not an accident). During the summer months, you can find JACAS performing in Tommy’s Park in the Old Port, and during the winter season, to hone their skills and to otherwise hang out and make each other laugh, JACAS meets here at Reiche School in the West End every Monday night.

But Hynes isn’t a circus performer. She’s in school at the University of Southern Maine to be a social worker. She has only a nominal interest in poi and not much interest at all should said poi be engulfed in flames. She tagged along tonight with Kennedy-Castro, who she works with at the Peoples Regional Opportunity Program (PROP) in Portland, because she’s anxious to go out on Mondays but doesn’t know where to go.

"I moved here from Sabattus five or six months ago," she says. "Sometimes, I go to Acoustic Coffee [on Monday nights]. They have an open-mic night and my boyfriend is a musician. But other than that, what else is there to do on Monday nights?"

As Hynes is finding, Monday nights in Portland in the middle of winter can present quite a challenge to the fresh-faced fun-seeker in all of us. According to an informal survey conducted by the Phoenix, the only nominally recreational locales that consistently rank Mondays as their most popular night are the area’s gyms. Representatives from Bally Total Fitness, the Bay Club, and Lifestyle Fitness Center in Portland, as well as the Portland Athletic Club in Falmouth, all agreed that Mondays are hot for people looking to shake off the weekend.

"I don’t know if it’s weekend guilt or what," says Carol Cooke, Financial Manager for the Lifestyle Fitness Centers in Portland and Scarborough. "I think people have overachieved on the weekend and come in and try to get a good start. Over the [course of the] week, it kind of fizzles out and by Friday it’s pretty dead in here."

John Robinson — a professor of sociology specializing in leisure at the University of Maryland and co-author of the 1997 book Time for Life, which studies trends in leisure activities in America from 1965 through 1985 — has never studied the use of leisure time according to days of the week. Nor have he or other experts contacted through the American Sociological Association, in Washington DC, heard of anyone who has. But Robinson said it pretty much seemed like common sense that there might be fewer things to do in Portland, Maine, on Monday nights in the middle of winter than on other nights of the week. Monday, Robinson points out, is traditionally the start of the work week and most people want to buckle down rather than party hearty.

"Monday is seen as a recuperation day," says Robinson. "People look at [Monday] as a way of sobering up, not in an alcoholic way, but in terms of saying ‘I’ve got to be productive this week and hit the ground running.’ "

A quick search of books on amazon.com which mention "Monday" in their titles supports Robinson’s theory that this day is characterized by work more than any other day of the week. The most requested books referring to Monday on the site include Monday Morning Leadership (on how to effectively manage your employees), Loving Monday: Succeeding in Business Without Selling Your Soul (on finding meaning in your job), and Don’t Pop Your Cork on Mondays: The Children’s Anti-Stress Book (presumably for toddlers who have already had enough of the rat race). A similar search for "Sunday" pulls up novels and self-help books about overcoming personal roadblocks and finding peace through meditation and self-love. A search for "Saturday," the day the majority of working America has completely free, turns up novels about tea parties, afternoon outings gone wacky, and the New York Times Saturday crosswords, which, according to the title, are the "hardest crosswords of the week." No books related to work were the top listings for any other day of the week except Monday, including all of the other traditional workdays.

Ray Lee’s been known to go out over the weekends, sure, but no night is closer to his heart than Monday night. Monday night has allowed Lee to participate intimately in the process of his local government and has even made him a community television star. For Lee, Monday night is special.

On Monday nights, the South Portland city council holds its meetings and workshops which Lee, a resident of South Portland for roughly 35 years, has attended consistently since he moved to town. As far as Lee is concerned, Monday night is damn important, so important that Lee used to hoard hundreds of tapes of recorded meetings up in his attic (before he lost them all in a fire), and it should be damn important to any upstanding member of the voting public because this is when the real local law is made and if you don’t keep an eye out, chances are you’ll get screwed.

By Lee’s estimation, he’s been screwed by the South Portland City Council on a number of deals since he moved to town. He’s been screwed by tax dollars spent on the pool in the South Portland Community Center ("I don’t use it, never been in it. Why should I pay for it?"), he’s been screwed by the recent decision to sell Sawyer Elementary School ("It’s a valuable piece of property. I don’t think they should have sold it"), and — this one he believes was personal — he was bitterly screwed when the council restricted him from building a second floor onto his Willard Beach home ("I wasn’t thinking. I should have just told them I wasn’t going to use it as a living space"). Monday nights, Lee gets to walk up to the podium in the council chambers and give the town’s elected officials a piece of his mind, help them see the light. If only they’d listen.

On this Monday, Lee has been screwed because the council is taking the night off, which means Lee will be forced to watch a TV movie to pass the time. Lee sits on a flannel-covered recliner in his living room. On the wall to his right, two framed jigsaw puzzles of outdoor scenes bracket a framed needlepoint of a rabbit. The television opposite him is muted. It is shortly after 7 p.m., around the time his blood pressure would start to rise during "Petitions and Communications" at a council meeting. At his hip dozes his toothless cat Fred, one of the six pets which Lee has rescued from the neighborhood streets. Lee’s wiry frame, which stiffens electric when he approaches the citizens’ podium, is now sinking into the chair. The house smells strongly of cigarettes and balled discarded packs litter the floor for Lee’s cat Jake to play with.

Lee says he doesn’t have a back-up plan for activities tonight now that the meeting is off. He may do a little packing because he leaves tomorrow on a business trip for two weeks, which means he’ll miss the next council meeting as well, which isn’t really the council’s fault at all but still kind of ticks Lee off.

"My grandfather was the most brilliant man and I remember him saying to me, he says, ‘There’s three types of people you don’t carry on a conversation or argue with,’ " he announces. " ‘You don’t argue with a drunk and you don’t argue with a fool or an idiot.’ When I talk to the city council, I’m talking to fools and idiots, because they’re not drunk. People say to me, ‘Why do you waste your time?’ And I say, ‘I don’t have ulcers because I let it out.’ It’s not what you eat that causes ulcers, it’s what’s eating you."