The Lost Art of Busking

Tonight we took the kids to see the 1st Annual Street Magic Festival, run by the Man With His Mitts in Everything, John Maverick.  I had the good fortune of meeting him while performing last year and discovered that he lives just up the street from me, and since then it's been one failed attempt to collaborate after another.  In fact, I'm supposed to head up the hill tomorrow so we can figure out if I'm too tall to be sawed into thirds (I'm fairly certain it's every girl's secret dream to be a magician's assistant).

Our trip, more specifically, a handful of comments overheard, made one thing perfectly clear:  we've forgotten how to appreciate real talent.  Night after night, we'll watch people eat bull testicles, run ludicrous obstacle courses, and all manner of talentless human degradation and call it entertainment - but you run across a person on the street whose spent hours perfecting a slight of hand, or some juggling feat and it's "boring" or "weird."  Around the fringes of the festival, I caught a couple of comments:  "Oh, it's just people doing tricks, let's go find a bar," or (in one miserable case) "Are you ready to go?  I don't want to miss Project Runway."

Further into the festival, we learned that we could ask anyone with a badge to do a trick.  My kids were all eyes - people juggling diabolos and clubs, hula hooping (Monster's favorite), a slew of Parkour guys doing back flips off railings and each other (VERY cool, but we're already informing Monster about the amount of practice required to successfully perform such feats), and various magicians of all ages wandering around with decks of cards and coins.

More exciting for me was watching my kids discover intimately that people can do the seemingly impossible and giving them coins to distribute to the performers that truly fascinate them.  In this digital era, where the notion of arts patronage is something only the elite can do and pedestrians avoid eye contact with street performers, there's a lesson there for my kids - we support the amazing in our family, in every tangible way.