tightrope walk

Definitions

1. 1

   An instance of walking on a tightrope.

   • Stunts like tightrope walks and barrel plunges were later banned at the falls, with fines of up to $10,000.
   • In 1859, French acrobat Charles Blondin dazzled Americans with his tightrope walks, the most famous of which were his repeated crossings of Niagara Falls.
   • As for the Logan siblings, Kendall likens his latest showdown with his father to “a tightrope walk on a straight razor ... Five-hundred-foot reputational drop.”
2. 2

   A perilous course between alternatives.

   • Not since Philippe Petit stepped onto a wire surreptitiously rigged between the towers of the late, lamented World Trade Center in 1974 has there been a tightrope walk as perilous and as public as Ivanka Trump’s.
3. 3

   Alternative form of tightrope-walk.

   • One boy tried to tightrope walk through the fountain until he was tugged back by a friend.
   • Set in New York in 1974, as Philippe Petit tightrope walks between the newly built Twin Towers, it tells of interlocking lives in the world below, from a radical Irish monk in the Bronx to an Upper East Side housewife.

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