A Minor Observation Re: “Street Performers”
Dear Hippies:
I used to be a street performer, professionally, and God knows I have been a hippie too, professionally, and I’d like to offer you some advice. I see you are putting on a show this year, to raise funds to repair your Westfalia microbus, and decorate your entire body in henna in the carefully drawn image of an entire other person, allowing you to apply for a credit card finally. I have a very high tolerance for you guys, really I do. I had a hemp necklace, I slept in a tipi.
So, if your multiple-scarf-wearing, shoeless, sodden-footed friends are sitting around you in their pancho hoodies, and lounging on their sleeping bags, and you have a kitten on leash and a hat laying out for money, I have some terrible news for you. That is not a show. I will not pay you.
A kitten on a leash is not a show.
Two scarves maximum, please, per person.
Likewise, if one of you has a guitar, and if the rest of your dreadlocked, pot-smoke-reeking crew are somehow emanating a nostril-shattering assault of body odour over and above the pot smell, and if you are playing on your guitar songs which came to you from Mother Moon, and if you have set your instrument case too far back in your communist den of stench so that it will be intimidating for me to navigate through your commune of friends to give you my change in disgust, you are not doing a show.
If you make it hard to pay you, you are not doing a show.
You are having a traffic blocking kitchen party.
Finally, if your drum circle isn’t drawing a crowd, and so you add, without regard to their skill level, two women with hula hoops, and if they look sincerely intense as they gyrate, eyes closed in the tragic fiction of rapture, and if you throw in someone fire-spinning in a pair of wrap pants you brought them back from your trip to Kopipi, and once every ten minutes someone makes an announcement that this is a show, and if there is no sense of order, structure, focus or purpose to your fiery, hoopy, shitty circus, then that is not a show.
I would rather give money to the kitten on a leash, which, may i remind you, is not a show.
At least the kitten on a leash is short, both in duration and height, and entertaining.
I even like hula hoops, just, not like this.
Send your smelly friends home, make eye contact with me, have a point, don’t denigrate street performers by trying to pull off this modified pan handling.
Oh, and speaking as a street performer again, yeah, I do have some change, i just earned a lot of it putting on a real show that makes sense and is entertaining, so NO you can’t have any of my change.
Sincerely,
RobbieRobTown
