T minus 17 days until we head off to Barcelona and our new era of world travel/voluntary homelessness commences. Marco is nothing but excited (it's his passionate fake Italian heritage, no doubt). I'm crazy excited too, but with what I'd like to think of as a healthy dose of terror (and let's attribute that to my real Polish ancestry - we've been reading up on Polish history to prepare for our trip and they've had plenty to be afraid of over the years). We’re going to be chronicling our various travels, adventures and misadventures here, so you should be sure to check up on us con frecuencia.
To get ready for our European tour and two (!) festivals, Mark and I have been trying to get back into the habit of performing our show regularly on the street. It's been hard since our go-to spot (Saturday at the Ferry building) no longer works with Mark's Circus Bella schedule. Fisherman's Wharf is another option, but many of the best time slots are booked by insured performers. Plus, the pedestrians are wary of being lured into yet another tourist trap, and most of the human statues are drunk. So, we decided to try Powell Street at the cable car turnaround.
Two days ago, we took our show to Powell and sat. And waited. And watched. And waited some more. The regulars at Powell (break dancer, mediocre tap-dancers, one man band with a 2ft hair wave, and the occasional angry bucket drummer) were friendly enough to talk to, but they definitely didn’t want to give up any of their time to let us have a turn. I bet “Need $1 for Weed” sign guy would have shared, but we didn’t really talk to him. Day one, unsuccessful.
Day two (yesterday), we got there around 2pm and waited some more. I had some practice doing this, so this time I was really good at it. Mark talked to the break dancer and the tap dancers, and it seemed like we’d be able to take a turn today. Flash forward two hours to the arrival of the one man scam and his number one hit “I don’t care if you think you’ve been waiting longer than me, I was here way before you were even though you haven’t seen me all day and I’m going next and have you ever thought about doing your show down the street a few blocks?”
And that moves us to everyone’s favorite ethnic stereotype: the Fighting Irish. I felt the blood boil up and glared real mean-like while Mark went to talk to the other performers. I had his back, you know? Luckily, all the dancers had our backs too, so big hair had to bow out. We set-up lightning speed and did a crazy show. My mic ran out of batteries, we tried out a new dance break (now cut!), Mark did the hat pitch blindfolded, and I picked an audience volunteer who didn’t speak any English. It was a great learning experience. The one man band watched our show, and I think he wants to be friends now. We’ll see, Music Man, we'll see...
And then we went to a midnight showing of the last Harry Potter film. All in all, a good day.
