This brief video was taken by the Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter CJ back in 2009, when I was working the streets of Minneapolis with a clown routine in order to make enough money to move back to Thailand. It took me three months to earn the airfare, and I learned a lot about street theater during that time.
For instance, I learned that there are dozens of bullying s.o.b.'s who make it a habit of shaking down street performers once or twice a day -- if you don't give them your money they punch you very hard. The cops have absolutely no interest in preventing this; they hate street performers and treat them like vermin.
So I learned to get scary crazy with the bullies. Whenever one would come up and demand my 'take' for the day I would pull out a big sports whistle and get right in his face to start blowing as loud as I could. If done without hesitation, making direct eye contact at all times, this always discomfited them enough to send them lumbering away.
I also learned to make a new sign each day -- in my case, in verse. Since I worked right in front of the U.S. Bank headquarters I got a lot of stuffy bankers who wouldn't normally give a beggar the time of day -- but when they noticed that I made the effort to write something original each day for my placard they started giving me ten dollar bills. And you don't do any better than that unless you're a pole dancer!
I worked the main drag of Nicollet Mall, a pedestrian walkway in downtown Minneapolis where only public buses were allowed to use the street. This is where most of the Twin Cities' street performers and homeless lunatics congregated. I was impressed by one young man's determination and simplicity of execution. He spent eight hours a day walking up and down Nicollet Mall, asking everyone "Can I have a quarter?" Most people ignored him or snarled at him to go to hell. But he never stopped, and so the sheer numbers favored him. I asked him how much he made in an hour and he said he could usually count on twenty-five dollars an hour. Nice work if you can get it.
Another guy, a really down-and-out bum who simply sat on the sidewalk with a scrawled cardboard sign that said "PLEASE HELP" actually kept a second piece of cardboard with him, on which were pasted personal checks, with the heading: "Do Not Accept."
A very cultivated gentleman, who rarely shaved and liked to drink Listerine, could recite page after page of Shakespeare for only a dollar, or sometimes he would walk beside a victim reciting the Bard if they DIDN'T pay him a dollar.
After knocking myself out doing slapstick, pantomime, and playing my musical saw to mostly indifferent crowds, I learned that what turns on the spigots for women and children is to simply sit down, look sad, and blow bubbles. I can't fully explain it, but when I would do this women would rush up to me in tears, saying "Oh, this reminds me of my childhood!" and then dump all their spare change into my bucket. And children were mesmerized by this simple expedient. They refused to move away from me until their parents emptied their purses. This leads me to the conclusion that you don't need any talent to succeed as a street performer -- only a deviant understanding of human psychology.
The problem with bubbles was that the cops were always looking for reasons to chase us street performers off the Nicollet Mall, even though we had a perfectly legal right to be there. So if one of my bubbles happened to float into someone's face and pop, causing them to blink and shake their head, a flatfoot would immediately pounce on me as a public menace and tell me to leave. It's no use arguing with the cops, unless you want to get shot, so I'd shuffle down a block or two and go back to work.
And finally, I learned that when it comes to rest rooms some stores have big hearts and some are just plain mean. Panera Bread would call a cop the minute I stepped into their store, but the Target security team was always very pleasant to me -- they never even searched me once, and began greeting me by name when I would come in.
It took me a few weeks to get the hang of street performing, but once I learned the ropes and got tough with interlopers who wanted to horn in on my performance so they could share in the 'take,' I started making anywhere from two-hundred to three-hundred dollars a day. That's on sunny, warm days. When it rained or the wind blew cold I was shit out of luck -- making less than 20 dollars for six hours work.
So do I ever give street performers money when I see one nowadays? Nope. Not even if they're blowing bubbles.
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