Spent all day today, from about 10:30am to 5:00pm literally fooling around town, juggling and goofing off…

I juggled around some of the monuments in the vicinity of Hopkins, one by MICA, and then spent a good solid hour to an hour and a half juggling in all four of the parks that radiate outward from the spiritual heart of Baltimore, the Washington Monument, which predates the more famous one in Washington, DC. Most of that was fairly uneventful as there wasn’t a hell of a lot of foot traffic and what little there was tended to be older business people going about their daily routine.

I did get a little action and some yelling (and quacking) from the Baltimore Duck Tour bus/boat things. If you’ve never seen these before, they were originally designed during WWII as beach landing vehicles for operations like D-Day, but now many cities use them as tourist vehicles. In Baltimore, when you go on it, I guess they give you a little duck sound noise maker, so whenever one passes by, you hear a bunch of people quacking, and lots of little kids waving. About four of those went by while I was juggling in the south park around the Monument and everybody on them lit up with huge smiles while I was juggling.

Met up with an old friend for lunch, which was good, and we talked about my foolish ways and my plans for what’s next, before I hit the trail and rode on down through the Inner Harbor to Fells Point, where I spent a while juggling in that park area near the circular marble bench thing and the lemonade stand. Nothin was really doin there though, so I high-tailed it back through the way I’d come, stopped to talk to a bum who’d said something about my mandolin on the way out.

And this time he said, “You ought to sit down and play that guitar here and we can split the money we get.” I passed up the deal and asked him how things were going down this way. He gave me the low down on where not to go - in terms of busking or asking for money or the like. Wasn’t anything I didn’t already know or couldn’t guess though, really: don’t go by Harbor Place or by the Aquarium. Which sucks, of course, because that’s where the huge crowds are and it would be fun and easy to make a big scene down there.

Not to be defeated though, I skirted the Inner Harbor in the other direction and climbed up Federal Hill, past something called The Trapeze School (which I may have to go back and investigate), and then situated myself by the canon and humongous American flag overlooking the Inner Harbor from the South. Only after a few minutes did I realize that there was a big old class of elementary school black kids behind me in a playground, who soon came running over in small hordes to watch me juggle and to show me how they could juggle two balls. I kept telling them that was good, but could they do two balls in one hand, and would demonstrate holding one hand behind my back. None of them could, but we all had fun and goofed around while their teachers and chaperones made sure that none of the kids tumbled off the hill into traffic.

After those kids left, I packed up my things and was about to zip off when an older white guy on a bench asked how long I’d been juggling for and if I were practicing to go down and perform in the Inner Harbor. They have a space there for street performing, but you have to have a license yadda yadda yadda. He told me about some woman who juggles fire down there, and I think I knew who he was talking about, because this little girl at a park by my house who was really smart told me about a lady who matched that description. Then we talked about how you just have to practice over and over again and he told me that he’d been learning the guitar and playing a little bit at his church, but was still having a hard time with it.

One of the things he asked, which I thought was the most interesting was, “How do you stay focused?” And he cited the fire woman who could concentrate on dangerous spinning flames while mobs of people circled round her. Having just juggled with a bunch of kids milling about, I told him I thought it was actually easier when other people were watching, because it frees you up somehow when you’re not looking at yourself.