A Beautiful Urban Drama!
When I get out of class on Thursdays I like to stop by Rocco’s for an enormous slice of the greasiest pizza on Earth and a $2 mini-pitcher of Pabst. CUZ I CAN. Tonight, a street performer across the street caught my eye, so I took my beer outside to watch this guy do his thing.
I tried to take video of the performance on my phone, but it turned out awful — my description is just going to have to work. This guy, in a full white suit, had surrounded himself with a fucking fortress of the most random shit you’ve ever seen. He sat perched atop a stool, next to which was placed (what looked like a) magician’s trunk, with scarves hanging out of it and a bunch of fake dubloons in the top. In front of him was a music stand, with a Wizard of Oz songbook. For trumpet. Oh yeah, and he wearing a Mickey Mouse hat. Not like the ears…it was a plastic Mickey Mouse face…in hat form. He wasn’t a BAD trumpet player, but I wouldn’t say he was good at it, either. So he’s happily kickin some serious Oz grooves (I recognized “If I Only Had a Brain,” The Lollipop Guild song and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”) and taking frequent, random breaks to put a rabbit-in-a-top-hat puppet on his hand and terrify anybody that happened to be stopped at the light. Yeah, I watched this for at least ten minutes and couldn’t figure it out, either.
Finally, after I had been watching for a while, a group of people with two or three djembes set up across from him and started pounding away and screaming some tribal chant. This of course completely drowned the trumpet guy out and he slowly lowered his trumpet to his lap, glaring at the group with this horrible look of heartbreak, defeat and contempt. End scene!
I have a couple possible explanations for this episode:
1. The two groups were actually in cahoots! First, trumpet guy sets up and begins his inarguably pitiful display. Then the djembe group moves in and totally drowns trumpet guy out. Trumpet guy really hams up conceding to the djembe group, and all passersby give trumpet guy “sympathy change.” Afterwards, both groups split the money.
2. Everybody in this town is fucking nuts.
Get Occam and his razor to work on that one.
February 29th, 2008 at 7:13 am
What if this group of Djembe players does nothing but follow this guy around all day and wait for him to really get going, and then walk in and steal his thunder.
Right before he hits his third act.
February 29th, 2008 at 7:16 am
Hahaha
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:15 am
This man is a Portland icon! I love him! Every time I see him on the corner of Burnside and Powells… or the offramp from Front Avenue onto the Hawthorne Bridge… or in front of Pioneer Place, I want to give him a huge smile and a squeeze for the very fact that his perfect white suit is always clean and pressed, his Mickey Mouse ears are on straight, and his trumpet is somehow not full of rain. I see him almost every single time I’m downtown, including yesterday…
Which was the day of the Urban Iditarod. He sat on top of the Hawthorne Bridge, blaring trumpet songs over a crowd of deaf ears in Waterfront Park below. The Iditarod ended there, with each team far into their drinking day at 2 in the afternoon. The teams consist of 1. The musher, 2. A shopping cart, 3. A team of human sled dogs, and 4. Costumes that consistently trumped everything I saw on Halloween last year. My roommate and some coworkers dressed their shopping cart as Pac Man, after finding it somewhere on Burnside… then they put on big colorful ghost outfits. Another of the best carts had a stripper poll, and strippers, grinding all over downtown for the four miles of the race. There was also a real fire in a cart, pulled by four very very hairy people in full caveman outfits. Each mile long leg ended at a bar. At some point, someone broke their leg. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvliXEsJ74Q&NR=1
It started pouring as soon as it was all over.
Portland, my hometown, I love you.
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:20 am
So you are confirming my second theory then?
March 4th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
And that includes you.