Juggling Things and Tap Dancing
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| Photo Credit: Melinnis on Flickr |
Jackson Square is like Wall Street for street performers — exploiting your double-jointedness or willingness to eat fire is serious business in a place so dense with tourists. Sure, for some, stilt-walking is just a stepping-stone to fame; something you do to earn bus fare out to Hollywood. But for many, a street performing gig in the French Quarter is a bona fide career.
One day soon after I moved there, when I was still looking for a job myself, I walked into a little sundries shop in Jackson Square to get the paper. It was lunch time, and the sole cashier was sitting on a stool near the back gnawing on a chicken leg.
"Be wit cha in a minute, Dawlin'," she called up to me while licking her fingers.
I was in no hurry. So I made converstaion with the clown who was using the shop as a quiet place to eat his own sack-lunch. The street performer, clad in rainbow striped socks pulled up to the hem of his bright orange knickers, big floppy shoes, and a ten gallon hat, answered my "hello, how are you?" with sincerity:
"Well, I'm 52. This weather is getting to me a little bit, ya know," he said.
"Yeah, it's a hot one today," I said.
"Hot, cold, hot cold. Makes this job so hard. And my bunions bother me sometimes, but I'm going to retire soon, ya know?"
"Oh, good for you," I said. "So how did you get into the business?" I asked after a few beats of silence. It's a question any job hunter would want to know.
"Been down here practically all m'life," he said. "My Daddy used to do card tricks over on Bourbon, but his old bones are too tired for that now too."
The conversation went on like that. I kept a straight face as the painted ear-to-ear smile told me about it's ailments and job woes between bites of a ham sandwich. This was way more entertaining than watching him make balloon hats, for sure. The only thing better I could imagine would be watching a couple of mimes at happy hour, because I thought of myself as a voyeur in a world so different from my own. I was a "career-woman" buying the paper to see all the "real" jobs advertised, after all. I was pretty sure that made me quite different from a clown.
As I sit here drinking my coffee with chicory, ironically working on this cyber street performance of my own, it occurs to me that I was wrong about being different from that French Quarter clown. Sure, our career strategies are divergent — Since then I've had a string of "real" jobs with different kinds of responsibilities. But the tasks — well, the tasks are strikingly similar. No matter what you do for a living, you might recognize this too: To some extent, that clown and I have both made our living juggling things and tap dancing with a big painted smile. When you're contemplating what you'll do next, it's good to know you have skills.
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