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.