The idea behind Sport Stacking is this: take twelve plastic cups and stack them – as fast as you can – in three pyramids consisting of three cups, six cups, and three cups, respectively, then collapse them back down again into three short stacks. Why not one pyramid of twelve? Or two pyramids of six? Because that’s not how Sport Stacking is done, Willow tells me.

That’s the name she goes by: Willow. Most days she can be found on the 16th Street Mall practicing the art of Sport Stacking and angling for tips from curious passers-by. The block is better known for loudmouth evangelists and speed chess hustlers, so Willow’s art is a pleasant addition.

Willow tells me she was born in India to two American expats. After coming back to the States, she says, her parents were killed in an auto accident. An orphan at 9, foster care never agreed with her. She ran a way shortly after entering the system and has lived on her own since. Next Saturday she’ll turn 19. Petite, short black hair, a clean red tee shirt, she looks like a suburban teenager. No one would know she was homeless to look at her.

Assembling the stacks of cups rapidly then breaking them down again, she explains to me that she’s bipolar and schizo-affective, with synesthesia thrown in for good measure. I ask her about this latter condition. It means she hears colors and sees sounds, she says. The sirens from fire engines appear deep green, for example, while ambulance sirens are dark orange. Worst of all is the RTD station at Broadway where the sounds of sirens, highway traffic, trains, and the occasional brawl, combine to make an unbearable world where colors combine into a white field that washed out her vision completely. It’s at that point the schizophrenia usually kicks in.

She says she doesn’t want to be “the crazy homeless lady,” however, and so is disciplined about taking her meds. The Stout Street Clinic provides them to her, free of charge, along with regular medical checkups. Most night, when it’s very hot or very cold, she stays with friends. But that’s not always possible. A few winters ago, the cold, along with a lack of regular food, sent her to the hospital with hypothermia.

I ask Willow if there’s a future for her in Sport Stacking on some obscure professional circuit. She doesn’t think so. It’s just a hobby about which she’s passionate, she tells me. Eventually, Willow adds, she’d like to be a writer, “a novelist, like Anne Rice.”