The embers glowing amid the ashes and logs of a cold winter night offer a place to cast a street performers dreams towards a warmer season and a brighter time. The melancholy of winter with dreary gray skies and with its mists and fogs and chilly winds eat at the heart of a buskers hopes. They stiffen the fingers and make long shirts and pullovers necessary. The sun rises late climbs half-heartedly to its noon time peak and then flees quickly into the west and sets. Street performers recollect longer days and opportunity. Winter is shrill to the heartstrings. The slow and inevitable waning light of autumn terminates with the solstice, and although it is slow going from that forlorn day in December the light of day begins to invest one minute or so each day back into the hopes and dreams of a street act. That is if they are patient. Some fling themselves by jet to the southern hemisphere and completely avoid the dance with the off season.
The first day of spring is a date on a calendar. The first day of spring for a street performer is a show under the springtime sun. It is a wildly intoxicating show that fills the heart and mind of the street act with a kind of promise and expectation. The small change and destitution of marginal shows and though generous insufficiently funded results give way to fat hats and good times once more. We are in the chips again. The girl's shoulders come out to kiss the suns light. Brightly colored skirts and shirts festoon the crowds. We all feel the warmth and renewal. We see lush green grass and mustard or lupine smothering the sides of rolling hills. Billowing bright white clouds hop and skip across the blue skies. The sun arches higher and its light palpably more dominant. Songbirds flit about grabbing this and that and hustling back to a branch on a tree where their nests are under construction. Swallows are about and are darting through the air chasing one another joyously and with aplomb. It is this big delicious life that is just bursting out at the seams. It is swelling with grass that is high. It is oozing with bugs. It is finally and once more here.
How many springs have finally come after such desperate times? Those little nuts stored in holes where no other animals might find them are running low by now. The wait seems long. Emotions are trapped and seep out in doubt and lack of confidence. I was about to curl up for some sleep in my bunk when a knock came at my trailer door.
"Hey, buddy? You turning in?"
"Yeah want to get some sleep so I can work tomorrow."
"You bet. Me too." my friend replied. "Well, I'll see you in the morning. I have a feeling our luck is about to turn"
"Probably rain all day." I said.
"They're callin'' for sunny weather."
"I know. Just complaining cause I still can."
It was a wondrous night in the trailer. Cool enough for a good sleep. The wind was still. The streets around the festival site were quiet. I had rolled in after sunset and hadn't tasted the day here. I had dropped south from San Francisco in a quick one and a half day 800 mile jump. Things had been damp and breezy through the San Jaquin. Bakersfield was cloudy and Mojave was blowing. The night before I had pulled off in Ludlow and was up and rolling before 7 AM. Had another four hundred miles to go before arriving here in the Valley of the Sun. The day of driving in the desert was especially fine, and I hadn't tasted such warm air on my skin or bright blue skies in my eyes in a long while. But doubts and anxieties still eat at an act that works outside. Wind, thunder, lightening can wipe out a promising day. And though it wasn't probable a street performers doubts can nearly pull down a low pressure system right on top of where they are going to perform simply to spite their miserable attitude and lack of confidence.
It is still to be proven again and again. Each new year we have to find out if the world remains interested in our work. Each year we have to find out if we have been passed over by new trends. As timeless an art as we practice it does fall out of favor from time to time. Perhaps this year things will not be so good. It could happen. Just like that too. Why the world could just walk away from us and like vaudeville things could dry up and we'd end up being a bunch of washed up dreamers sitting around thinking about old days. We see evidence in the record. Music companies flailing about trying to put a halt to music file swapping. The big three networks on television getting smaller and smaller audiences for their prime time shows. I've had rodeo clowns lament that times had gotten tougher. Some of my favorite talent agents are men and women who had just caught the end of vaudeville. Their specialties in dance, circus arts, song or comedy came to perfection just as their venues were going belly up from coast to coast. Old circuits die off and new possibilities emerge. One of my favorite agents was stage manager at the Palace in New York City in its last days. Took his act on the road and went belly up in Walla Walla. Found himself in New York again and was hired by Ringling Brothers. Did I say hired? He had auditioned and the director asked him if he had his suitcase with him. He said he did not. The show manager said that if he could find his suitcase that he would find a bunk on the train for him. As for his audition the manager said that it was awful, but that there would be time to train him in the clowning arts, though he thought he might be of more value just by being young and strong rather than old and weak. That man found a life that spring back in the early 1950's. Witnessed the last tent shows and the first arena shows. Saw the end of a legendary storied way of life and the beginning of a new one.
Nothing shocks the senses of a street act in spring like the salty sweat rolling from our foreheads in the heat of the day. Why just the week before I was sweeping puddles of rainwater from the space where I was doing shows in San Francisco. Today I am dodging from one piece of shade to another and risking my pale skin against the radiation from a fierce desert sun. Spring mornings in Phoenix delight while the afternoon punishes only to slowly simmer us like cooling charcoals in a barbeque. We douse ourselves in hops and grains of amber foam. We meet up in knots of gossip in the postmortem of what the day had been. We talk of smiling children and hot asphalt. We reckon on whether it will be more of the same tomorrow or perhaps a bit cooler. We are at the mercy of the world. We eat the sun and slumber in the moonlight. We peel sweat stained shirts off and toss damp socks into our laundry duffels. We feel the force of our work regaining relevance and know that the light of day and the warmth of air turning its tide in our favor. It's our new season and we are intoxicated by its promise.
We emerge as washed up losers of a long winter and become a kind of rite of spring. We don't hold that pathetic look of wistful longing for a better day. We arrive with the thunder of big circles of applauding souls once more captivated by our antics. We emerge as the brave hearted, the ones who hung in there and stuck another hard winter out. We bring song to lover's hearts and hope of color and fun to those who know something about holding the beating heart of life in the center of their beings in the midst of the hubbub of a sea of human life. We kiss our new lovers like newborns at birth. We are awash in the present and hear the distant sounds of a cold wintry day dying off in our fears that are muting now.
It won't be long before we are working at dusk because the days are too hot. It won't be long before we are hoping for a break from the heat. It is never perfect for long in our line of work. One day is all we get, and sometimes only part of one day. We all dream of that show under the shade of a tree on deep green grass with a crowd ensconced by our stunts and musings. We look upward through the dappled light of the leaves and fight to figure what is juggling object and what is plant. We skip the stunts we know might be beyond our reach and seek to present ourselves always perfectly though that is but just one of our delusions.
And after so many long winters where for no good reason we held on or held out for better days we come to see this new life emerging in its fierce glory once more. We look back and a stack of years and decades of melancholy and diminishing reserves rack our security. We get right on the edge of disaster and then our hemisphere slowly tilts more favorably toward the sun's beams. We are rolling pennies in February and digging into our jars of change to make ends meet. It hits us every winter hard. We are sure we are washed up and no good any more. Even if we've seen tough winters before we are ready to believe this one is different and like the old ball player its not only time to sit on the bench it might be time to hang up the old uniform too. Laughs aren't anywhere to be found in those winter crowds. Seems there isn't a sparkle in the eye of a single audience member. Looks like its time we just roll over and let the tides of time wash our hopes away. We prefer to blame ourselves though we do like to fault our audiences too. We'd love to hang it on them, but then we realize that it is by our own slothfulness that we hadn't practiced as hard as we vowed. Sure we practiced, but we didn't really try as hard as we could. Sure we tried to perfect a new move, but that move remained beyond our grasp. It wouldn't surrender to our efforts. The new move turned out to be as hard as we reckoned it to be. We figured 30 minutes a day for a few months and we'd have it. We'd finally do it one time and figure we could do it again until we could do it every time, but then we never could. And in that effort we'd lose our humor. The challenge can have a way of making our hearts angry and our craving obvious. The street artists I know all haggle with themselves on the path to their ruin. Once when they were talent less and young and all energy their shows were sheer emotion and inspiration to be burdened by what they learned and perfected and presented. One day they find they are like an old washed up on shore clam shell.
The new life that is spring must not be passed over lightly by the street performer. The veteran needs to affix attention to that which is least seen. The costume, the stunts, the props, the music, the lines of patter all polished and cleaned and ready for the new season don't guarantee success. Every effort must be made to latch onto the illusive living new inspiration. We must find our minds tilting toward some sparkling new insight that will drive our work forward. How can we be twenty years in this business working night and day, summer and winter and be bound to such oversight? It is the invisible stuff that is right before us. It is so close as to be impossible to glimpse. In a flash there is a crack of light on the subject. Our minds discern a more basic truth spoken through the wordless reality of our hearts. Our changes and aging alter us, and in that amending of self comes the shock of a new approach to our work. It isn't a line, joke or bit. It is more basic more elementary than that. Its arc spans the entirety of what we do. It is a basic piece of human wisdom revealed with which we then incorporate into our performance and find its truth resonant with our audience. It isn't the ultimate solution, it is just the next in a long line of changes, which if they stick become kind of a stage that we grow through, and then grow again, and perhaps again. It is this basic human understanding that comes from the analysis of what we feel from our audiences that provides us with our path. This is what spring makes of a dedicated street performer. It takes us on our annual journey to our dark night of our soul. Some of us don't make it and bag it and head out on new paths. Others of us find new fortune in our prospecting. We go mining in places of great obscurity and mystery. We discover and then test our insight and in that glow of a warm new spring day we learn whether we have a new clue as to how this all might work out for us this season. You see the street of dreams is really a place where new human kindness finds expression and is manifest through the sacrifice of the performers who bet everything that they still have something to offer.
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