First Contact with a Busker in Boston: Wacky Chad!

First: Sorry for the lack of a real blog post last week.

And second: Sorry again for the lack of a substantial blog post again this week.

It's been a busy two weekends, but I'll make it up to all of you next weekend!

I went down to Faneuil Hall this weekend and ran into a street performer (the first variety act that I've seen since moving here)! It was exciting - he has a great show and a great hat line! (Remember: a hat line is the pitch that street performers make when they let their audiences know that they perform for tips).

Photo credits to Monica Liu

Check out his website, and see if you can catch him if you're ever in Boston.

Wizard Wars!

Cuz... I don't have time to write a post this week, I shall point you in the direction of a show that has been on my Need-to-Watch list for some time now:

Wizard Wars!

Check out Magician Billy Kidd! (She was featured in my Genii article on Women Street Performers).

Street Performers as Agents

The two-year-old boy had a fever, but he was mostly quiet. He and his big brother – a four-year-old who sat with his legs dangling off the side of the couch – had been pacified with some late morning cartoons. Anyway, their father had told them to be good so that he could answer some questions, and they obliged. A fortuitous fever for the younger one had pulled them both out of daycare for the chance to spend some quality time with their daddy. That was their plan all along. Unfortunately, someone had co-opted that plan: In the room adjacent to the living room, their father sat at a dining table, embroiled in a boring adult conversation.

Their father, 30-years-old at the time, commented that this would be his fourth interview in a month. I had seen him several times before, but I had never seen him like this: his face, hands, and clothes had lost the silver hue that so defined him. If it weren't for the fact that his naturally jet-black hair had been dyed bright red, I probably wouldn't have recognized him. Here was a man who had a real name, one that his family and friends all knew and used. But for us, and for the thousands of pedestrians who have seen him working on the streets, he is known simply as the Tin Man. That, actually, was how he introduced himself to me when I first approached him for this study.

The Tin Man, in this case, was being interviewed as a public figure in the privacy of his home. He spoke reflexively on the matter as our first interview slowly began:

TM: "Apparently there’s an influx of either students or people making documentaries or something like that, but um… I noticed – well, while I was in school, I know that homeless people and street performers are like the popular ‘Let’s make a documentary!’ subject in school, you know, especially downtown. Cuz schools are downtown."
H*: "Like DePaul? Yeah, you’re right."
TM: 'Yep […]. Cuz I guess I – they’re easy to approach. They’re not like a business or something, or people don’t seem ‘em that way. They’re like 'Hey! Let me… interview you!'"

Here, very early on in my research, I had stumbled upon the question of who, exactly, a street performer is. In one breath, Tin Man brought up “homeless people” and “street performers.” In the next, he contrasts them to “a business or something.”

Street performers have to ask for money, but asking for money is not the same as begging for it. Ron Swanson knows the difference:

Asking for business - getting people to see their worth as performers - is a large part of what goes into every show.

I've spoken a bit before about the discomfort some buskers have with being compared to panhanders. I have spoken many times - through the Tin Man, through Jeremy the Magician, and a bit more generally - of street performers speaking of their work as... work. Juxtaposing these perspectives together, however, reveals an interesting tension that I haven't really yet articulated.

I would like to speak of street performers as agents.

Not this kind of agent...
Yeah, yeah... I am still watching this.

The most extreme of these examples would be that of GoldGrrl who was arrested while standing absolutely still in a public space.

A noise complaint brought the initial police officer over, but, in the end, she was arrested for and charged with "misdemeanor, resisting arrest, [and] interfering with a police officer" - none of which had to do with the original complaint. In her account, GoldGrrl noted that after an initial interaction with the police officer on scene, she decided to focus on her performance and ignore the officer's further attempts at interaction.

The situation quickly escalated. As she said, "The cops are talking to me, I'm being stubborn, so they send out black lady cop. You know, to try and deal with me. But at this point, I've already made the decision that I'm not gonna move. And I can't, I can't give in now."

*Photo courtesy of Gold Grrl

She asserted her right to perform in a public space through the ultimate act of civil disobedience: she stood still. And when the officer bristled at being unacknowledged and called for backup, the everyday frustration of needing to deal with the same police officers transformed into an ideological stance - she would not "give in."

Maybe street performers are secret agents after all.
See? This is my secret agent badge.

GoldGrrl's example is an extreme one. But everyday acts of self-expression come through in other moments of not moving. The Tin Man, another living statue, has a sign that says "Donations make me move!" Yet, despite that sign, he doesn't always move when people pay him. He moves when he has stayed still long enough to have gained donations from most of his audience members - when, as he says, he has gained their "respect."

Maybe that's why it's so hard for street performers to gain the status of businesses; they are human beings who refuse to be objectified, to have their art unlinked from the labor that they put into it. The choice of busking as a career is itself a critique of the lack of viable alternatives for meaningful middle-class work.

It is in the street performer's ability to decide when and whether to perform that she is empowered as an agent against the crowds of shoppers who ultimately pay her. This agency is partially granted to her through the ways that the city is organized physically and socially. Regardless of how much buskers try to claim for themselves (in the eyes of the public) the status of businesses, this freedom is also, perhaps, the very thing that makes that status impossible to achieve.

*H is the videographer who helped me record footage from this interview.

Finding Myself. Or Rather, Finding the Right Self to Perform.

"Oh wow. She has a dirty mind."

Someone said that about me.
About me in the middle of a show.
Quietly, but loudly enough for me to catch the words.

I remember that very very clearly. Her comment had made me a bit uncomfortable, but that discomfort was paradoxically paired with laughter from the rest of the audience. Since I was already on a roll, all I could do was ignore the comment and push forward with the rest of the show.

I've been having a hard time, you see, trying to figure out how to present my straight jacket escape. I've tried pure dramatic - and while I know I'm better at dramatic than funny, dramatic just doesn't seem to fit in well with the rest of my show. And as I learned from other buskers, funny is important. On the street, funny produces laughter which draws in the crowds.

I can be funny. I think some of my friends and family find me funny - but my particular brand of humor is coated with cheese and tends to provoke more groans than laughter. The bawdier brand of humor that I've adapted on the streets, I've had to learn.

Coated with cheese whiz, to be exact.
One whiz wit! Cuz that's the only way to eat one of these things.

It is that bawdiness, I think, that people who know me are shocked by when they see me performing on the streets for the first time. It's more than that though. It's the confidence. It's the way I carry myself and the way I fire back when a tit-for-tat battle of words with an audience member finds its way into the performance.

It's something that I struggle with doing for an audience of peers.
But, for audiences of strangers, it's when I feel most alive.

Is it authentic though?
Whatever that means.

Back in high school, I remember reading something about performers and personas and avoiding the mistake of seeming inauthentic, especially when the character you play on stage contrasts too sharply with the person you are around your friends.

I was cognizant of that shift just a few weeks ago, at a post-project celebration at a bar with co-workers. I was tired and quiet and not particularly feeling like working too hard to make conversation when all of a sudden, someone in our group pulled aside a server and asked if she wanted to see some magic.

I didn't have to think too much about it. I just stood up and fell into the practiced confidence of a familiar routine, as though someone had injected a shot of espresso into my bloodstream. I even got a free drink out of it. But that suddenly energized, more confident version of myself is still a far cry from the street performer who, while getting strapped into a straight jacket, asks the volunteer whether or not this is the first time he's ever tied a woman up*.

"Nope! Not at all. I do this all the time," he said with a grin.
(Photo credits to KimbaWayne Photography)

My brother, who was at one point serious about being an actor, told me that acting was all about channeling different versions of yourself.
The characters you play are simply caricatures of some aspect of yourself. If we can push the right buttons and find the right emotional triggers, we could all be murderers.

Or maybe something a little less extreme than that.

Jeremy, the Magician from Britain, plays a British guy. I mean, he is British, but his whole costume (from his Union Jack vest to the label, 'Magician from Britain,' on his hat) screams I'm British! Emmett, the Windy City Wizard, is from the southern United States and sometimes actually has a southern drawl that he pairs up with a wooden cane and the trench coat of a vagabond performer. The Tin Man tells me that when he is walking around in his silver, he is walking around with a layer of confidence that makes him act differently than when he's walking around as a civilian.

But it's not just street performers who do this. Teachers are performers too, who use the confidence of their personas to manage their classrooms. A writer's voice on paper often varies drastically from the voice that comes out of her mouth.

So is the character that I play on the streets really a version of myself?
I think so.

Though most of us don't recognize it as a performance, we all nonetheless perform different versions of ourselves in different contexts. And none of us are being "fake" when we do so.

And my performance on the street only works for me because I am, in characterly^ at least, completely unaware of the double meaning of my words. If I can make a comment about the volunteer tying me up with a completely deadpan expression on my face, then the innuendos no longer come from me - they are created in the minds of the spectators.

The one joke that does fall flat, no matter how many times I try it, fails exactly because I haven't figured out how to portray it with the same degree of naivety that I insert into the rest of my jokes.

*while looking through a volunteer's imaginary wallet*Me: "So, eh, what do you do? Are you a clown?"
Volunteer: "What? No."
Me: "Ah, ok. I was just trying to figure out why you're carrying around this little white balloon."

I'm still going to try it though. And I'm going to keep on developing this side of me - partially because the better I am at playing this role, the better the audience's reactions (and, subsequently, the value of their tips). But I'm going to keep on developing this character because this is a version of me that rarely ever comes out. Though I only see her out on the streets, I'm interested in learning a little more about her.

*Which, I admit, is a stock straight jacket escape joke - which I hope I've managed to make my own. Except, you know, the street performer is usually a guy.
^ICly... AH! Out comes my dorky roots. Not that my dorkiness wasn't already a given.

The Sparsity of Women in Magic

I went to a meeting of the International Brotherhood of Magicians (IBM) in Boston last week.

I seem to stop by one of these every time I move to a new city. In Chicago, it was the Society of American Magicians (SAM) - though, in all honesty, I only really went twice the entire year and a half that I lived there. I went to the the IBM ring in Memphis on a more regular basis back in 2010 - but that was my first exposure to the world of magic organizations.

And I really did enjoy my experiences at each of these clubs. It was great meeting other magicians - all of whom were very very friendly.

Here's something that I always knew but didn't really realize until I went to some of these clubs. There are almost no other female magicians. In fact, I think I really only met another female magician at one of these meetings just this last week at the IBM meeting in Boston.

On that note - and because I'm not feeling that well tonight and am planning on crashing early - I refer you to a Wired article that I very much enjoyed about women in magic: "There Aren't Many Women in Magic, But Those Who Are Kick Ass."