the timboucher experience

Last weekend, I went to Robert E. Lee park with a couple friends and their little doggies. Brought along my mandolin and my juggling balls, got myself situated and fired those babies up. I hadn’t - at that point - made a conscious decision to do it as public performance. It was more of a test run to see what would happen and how it would feel.

It felt good. I played my mandolin and sat on a tree root overlooking Lake Roland. A couple people walked by or watched for a moment as their dogs ran down to splash in the water. One lady came over and asked if she could photograph me, with her iPhone. Supposedly she was going to put the picture on her blog, but I’m not sure if that ever happened.

Then I switched over to the juggling in a more public grassy area and did that for a while. Dogs like juggling (visually stimulating), and since this is an off-leash park, a bunch of them kept running over so they could play. Once in a while I would alternate tennis balls in for them to go run and catch. This is what I spent most of my time doing when I was still at the dog daycare place.

After a while, maybe about ten or so people gathered around the periphery of the grassy area, as their dogs ran back and forth. I considered it a good test run.

This past week has held many adventures and opened my eyes to many new possibilities of how to exist in and interact with the rest of the world. So today, I took it back to the streets. Or that is, the park. The one by my house. There is a playground with a bunch of plastic stuff on it at one end and then it has a narrow band off running north up Beech Avenue, with some open fields and scattered trees. I positioned myself uphill a good ways from the playground proper and just started juggling.

Within a couple minutes, three kids on bike rode by and one yelled out “NICE!” and shouted, “Can you do four balls?” Which I promptly did, and could see the moment that I earned their respect or admiration or something good. There was some miscellaneous chit-chat about juggling three versus four balls and how the whole trick is that you just have to keep practicing in order to get good.

Oh, and I forgot, before they stopped their bikes to watch for a couple minutes, the lead boy nervously asked, “Do we have to pay you to watch?”

The question caught me off guard, as I was just in the park juggling for the heck of it, really - moreso to overcome my fears of performing in front of other people and putting myself out there than anything else. I told him no, they didn’t have to pay.

A little while after that I saw from the corner of my eye some much younger kids peel away in a little pack from the playground to come watch (”I wanna play!” I heard one of them shout), but were promptly caught by whatever parent didn’t consider a lone juggler in a green Hawaiian shirt with a Mojo bag full of birdseed and a crazy hat to be worthwhile company. But then right after that, a bunch of kids with maybe more open-minded parents did run over, and their moms came too and they all stood and watched me juggle - very intently. It was funny, because I guess I wasn’t expecting anybody to just come right right up in front of me and stare at me that intently. Adults just don’t do that kind of stuff in ordinary company, but kids haven’t developed those kinds of boundaries so much.

One kid said, “That’s a nice bike.”

“Thanks,” I responded. “I got it on Craigslist.”

“Who made it?” he asked.

“Nobody,” I said. “It was made in a factory.”

“Oh.”

The kids were really nice and friendly and asked me lots of questions about whether or not I could juggle rattlesnakes, or Black Widow scorpions, or sharks or crocodiles and we talked about why each of those things would or wouldn’t work to juggle. It was actually really funny and I had a good time talking and juggling with them. And their moms seemed totally cool too (I heard some other woman talking to them about moving to California soon to study holistic healing), though they mostly kept to themselves.

I’ve never really performed for anybody like that before, let alone kids and it taught me a hell of a lot just in a short time (I was out there for about an hour). It was especially informative seeing what kinds of gimmicks you can use to entertain a little kid versus the types of ones that work on dogs. Some of them are the same and some of them are different. I also didn’t expect the kids to be so interactive, I guess - to ask so many questions and to have so many funny things of their own to say.

The whole experience was really rewarding and worthwhile. I’m going to do it again, but I’m probably going to take it to some different parks and start rotating locations, etc. At some point, I’d like to start working in songs and either mandolin or guitar, as well as getting some other people involved to go run around and play with me.

• Hand-Stands In The Park
• Partner Juggling, Notes
• Music in Wyman Park (Baltimore)
• Bird Seed Blessings
• Next Week On Tap: