This Week: Commemorating 50 Years Since Philippe Petit’s WTC Wire Walk

August 7, 1974 was the date that French acrobat Philippe Petit made his unthinkable (and quite illegal) tightrope walk across the Twin Towers of the original World Trade Center. As I chronicled in my earlier post, my good friend and sometime collaborator Jim Moore was right there with him as assistant and chronicler. A front row seat at hair-raising history!

I wanted to let you know about two ways this half-century milestone is being observed over the next few days. This Sunday (August 4), there will be a segment devoted to it on CBS Sunday Morning, featuring historic clips and new interviews with Petit, (possibly) Jim, and others. Having dealt with this show before as a publicist I can tell you that there’s always a caveat. They have several segments in the pipeline at any given time, and you never know until it airs what stories will be included that week. But this seems like a pretty strong contender, barring the advent of time-sensitive news that might bump it.

Then, on August 7 and 8, there will be a special performance by Philippe — and Sting! of all people — at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Sting has written a special song for the occasion, James Marsh (director of Man on Wire) is presenting a short film, and Philippe and a troupe of performers are presenting 19 short scenes in a piece called Towering!! It is unclear whether Philippe will walk a tightrope, but I hope he will, as the 124 foot high ceilings in the Cathedral would certainly make such a stunt both possible and impressive. Information and tickets for that event are here.

In related news, today is also the birthday of Blondin, who walked a tightrope over Niagara Falls!