This weekend in my neighborhood of Baltimore - Hampden - there was a street festival with vendors and stages and what-have-you. Unlike most neighborhoods, Hampden has two different yearly festivals: this one, Honfest and Hampden Fest, which I think happens at the end of the summer. Most of the people I know who actually live around Hampden and surroundings say they hate Honfest, mainly because it’s lots of upper middle class people from the county coming in to gawk at the locals, essentially. I guess Hampden Fest has a better rep in general.

In any event, I went out and juggled for about an hour on the streets at Honfest on Saturday. It was a very different experience from when I juggled at the Sowebo Festival (another Baltimore neighborhood, farther south and west) a few weeks back. At that one, I felt more of a sense of connection to the crowd and like the festival was in general more community-oriented. There was just an attitude of people getting together and hanging out, whereas this one was more like people came here to look. Which I guess there’s nothing wrong with. Juggling feeds on that, obviously. But people seemed more distant, more like they were walking around like zombies a little bit. At the Sowebo festival, I ended up having many many more person-to-person type experiences: people wanting to show me how they could juggle, or wanting to talk to me about x, y and z.

At Honfest though, nobody really tried to talk to me, except for people who are locals in the neighborhood. One old man asked if they’d kicked me off my street-corner, the one by this church and kitty-corner from the Golden West (a restaurant with good food and ambience and so-so service). Another middle aged lady came by and asked if I was “trying to be discovered” and then asked if I wanted a soda. I said water would be fine, and she came back with two big styrofoam cups of ice water, which was really nice. Oh, and there was one man walking by with his wife who used me to create a comedic situation of his own.

“Do you know why this man is juggling, honey?” he asked his wife, right as I dropped a club in the street.

“He used to be the CEO of a major corporation,” he said - inspiring all kinds of PKD Jason Taverner recursions in my head… but I knew that wasn’t what he was talking about.

“Until they found him juggling the books.”

We all laughed and they walked on.

Some guy with a really fancy video camera recorded me for a minute and a bunch of people took photos of me, but never said hello or talked with me - which I thought was weird. Part of it may simply be the choice of media on my part though: juggling balls isn’t quite as physically intimidating as juggling a bunch of spinning white clubs flying through the air. I think you’re less likely to try to get in that person’s way who’s keeping aloft a bunch of objects which could hit you in the face (which I incidentally did to myself once while people were watching).

But I guess the biggest like “life lesson” that I took away from the whole experience is that sometimes you just end up dropping a club in front of a bunch of people and you just have to pick it up and keep going. Sometimes you keep dropping them too. And you just have to keep going. By the time all’s said and done, noone’s really counting how many times you drop it anyway (although… who knows) and the majority of people walking by in a crowd like that aren’t really watching you anyway. They just see somebody juggling and keep walking. And so for most of them, you’re not dropping it over and over again.

I think that’s one of the weirdest things about performing that I’m starting to see from juggling and from playing up at El Rancho Grande on Wednesday nights with everybody is sort of gauging something about what you’re doing by other people’s reactions. Most of us do that all the time, I think - but we just aren’t so aware of it as someone who is trying, like myself, to learn how to become an engaging performer, able to reach people in the way you mean to reach them.

Oh, speaking of which, one other thing happened. I dropped one and a woman dressed with just a little twinge of hippy chic walked by and laughed. I picked it up and she said, “I’m not laughing at you.”

I started back up juggling and just said, “I don’t care if you are.”

She made a face. I realized that sounded meaner than what I meant. People should laugh at you if you’re juggling. That’s what something like that is for: to spread amazement, joy, whatever you want to call it. It kind of doesn’t matter if someone’s laughing at you or with you at that point. As long as they’re laughing.