Street Performance

I now realize that it's actually quite difficult for me to keep up a reasonable blog during my show season. I don't know why I thought I could. I mean, I'm just way too busy trying to keep up with making chain and selling it.

Fortunately I have a few months off each and every year to try to get ahead, which also means that I have more time to write.

Today I want to tell you a story about someone I met at my booth. He was a busker. And for some reason, probably because he saw me interacting with my customers, he decided to ask me about busking in Victoria.

Oh, quick aside: They're customers. Sure, some are clients, some are friends, but they are also customers. I have no problem with that word. "A person that buys goods." In fact, not only don't I have a problem with that word, I actually hope that some of them live up to it!

Ok. Back to my regularly scheduled story.

He came by my booth and waited until I was free. Nice of him to do that.

He introduced himself, and said that he was new in town. "Obviously", he said, "you know the city better than I do." Little did he realize that I'd only been here a few years myself. Where, he was wondering, was a good place to busk?

Busking, as I'm sure you know, dear reader, is performing on the street for money.

Well, I've done my share of busking in the past, and some places are better than others. But some places are better for some types of busking, and others places for other types. And so I asked him what he did in his act.

"I do tricks with a yo-yo." I was polite and let the obvious comeback slip by unsaid.

"Can you show me", I inquired.

And he did.

Now, dear reader, a number of years ago I had the dubious pleasure of watching the world's most boring fire-eater perform. How, you may wonder, can you possibly make fire-eating boring? Well, he did. No facial expressions. No patter. No timing. Just one feat with fire after another, monotonously. Ad nauseum. If I didn't know better, I would have bet that the nerve endings in his face had been severed.

When he was finished I asked him if I could work with him the next day.

"Sure", he said, with about as much inflection as an accountant who has been sedated.

The following afternoon I was wearing totally stupid looking blue clown clothes and poorly applied clown make-up. When he went to swallow his fire, I got out a seltzer bottle and squirted water down my throat. When he went to juggle his torches, I juggled water balloons, carefully dropping one at the most propitious moment. When he put the petrol in his mouth and blew flames, I sprayed the audience with water from my own mouth. Whatever he did with fire, I did with water. I was the water-eater to his fire-eater. And wow, did we do well.

I explained to my yo-yo dude that most of street performance, as with sales, is about the patter, the glib gab, the slip of the word with the slip of the tongue. I pointed out that he needed an intimate space, that people weren't going to see his tricks from more than ten feet away. It was obvious that while he was proficient with the double disc on a string, he was woefully underwhelming with the wordage.

And I could see that he was beginning to falter. He needed encouragement. A start. Something that he could build on.

"Look", I said, "you're Jewish."

"Whoa," he interrupted, "how did you know?"

"Your pendant," I pointed out, "your hair. Your schnoz? It's not that difficult to see. So go with that. Remind the people that the yo-yo is a Jewish invention."

He looked at me as if realizing for the first time that I might just be a few fries short of a Happy Meal.

"It is?"

"Of course it is. Don't you know that Hebrew is read from right to left? It's actually called an 'oy-oy'."

He started to crack a smile.

"And you just came up with that on the spot?"

"Yeah. Sorry. Best I could do under the pressure."

And with that, he went on his way, eager to try one of the corners I recommended. From what I heard, he actually did quite well the rest of the season.

Now, what does this have to with chain-mail? Simple. It's not just about the product. It's about the art. The performance. The salesmanship. The relationship. People can find your product elsewhere, sometimes for less, sometimes better quality. But they can't find you anywhere else. When you're selling your work, your also selling them a memory of you.