TIM BOUCHER, FALL 2010

Yesterday, I went on a journey of observation. An attempt to exoticise the familiar and find the secrets hidden in plain sight all around me. After hitting the defunct Showtime Theatre for some reconnaissance, I hoofed it down Howard Street to Baltimore’s 142 year old costumier, A.T. Jones & Sons, for some spirit gum. Spirit gum is that resiny goop theatre people use to attach fake hair and prostheses to their faces. “We hide really well,” a woman who works there told me on the way out (I brought them their mail, which was laying in the doorway on the way in). Indeed, I’d walked past the place a million times (okay, maybe more like dozens) without having known what wonders lay within: suits of armor, myriad operatic costumes, a full-on custom costume shop within spitting distance. I did not buy a fake mustache, but I had fantasies of doing just that: building a new identity to put on and walk the streets of Baltimore looking for hijinks. I wondered what I would pretend to be: an elderly man in age make-up feeding pigeons in the park. Maybe change my race for a while…

Instead I walked for five hours. Stopped at Lexington Market to observe. Sat upstairs in the atrium for a while, observing a crazy woman in the corner observing me. Watching carefully my clock to make sure I hadn’t exceeded the “20 minute seating limit” signs. And puzzled over the sign posted by the management which read, “For your safety, please use only one chair.” That is, until I saw a black lady come up and stack two chairs so her small daughter could sit at a more appropriate height to the table – and then go through the same stacking routine for herself. I couldn’t fathom why, as she herself was full grown and already at a good height to eat fried chicken at the table. Padding maybe? The sign seemed to indicate something more though: a common ritual, culture of the place. People felt like they needed two chairs. I wonder how often they broke that a sign needed to be instituted.

It’s hard not to be a spectacle in places where one clearly does not fit in. But if you walk just so, carry yourself right, you can fly under the radar at least a little bit. I noted the staircases and exits. Felt like I was casing the joint, didn’t know what it was I was looking for, but let it come to me.

Walked on through the city, stopping here and there to have a seat, wait and look around carefully, noting people’s clothing, attributes, props, articles, accessories, demeanors, ways of walking, the groupings of people, the nature of each place I went to, how they somehow strung together to form a city. I read chapters out of Tahir Shah’s Trail of Feathers as I went – currently my favorite writer, whose work I’ve begun avidly devouring. I wished for some greater mystery to unveil itself as I went, but found nothing but small pleasures. A man east of the fountain square by the defunct Mechanic Theatre (near Mayor d’Alesandro) asked me which way Baltimore Street was. I gave him a friendly but uncertain reply. He told me he’d just been in “the IRS building there, riding the elevator.” He waved an envelope in front of him like a sword, illustrating. “Any of you want this?” he cried out. “I haven’t paid in ten years!”

On my way back from the Harbor, after enjoying a burrito and chips while imagining myself sailing away from here, I came back up by way of City Hall, War Memorial Plaza and the monuments down there – reading another chapter beneath the watchful eye of the Negro Soldier delivering roll call for the dead. Cut up from there through the Block, Baltimore’s sex club district, home to the Gayety Theatre, Baltimore’s oldest burlesque theatre, once a major stop on “the circuit”, now a Hustler Club and an extant bridge between the worlds of theatre and prostitution, an association which still haunts the stage. What a great facade that building still has…

Upon completion of my grand foot voyage, I settled back into my apartment and let it all coalesce. The places I’d been, the things I’d seen. The spectacles, the scenes, the tragedies, the comedies played out in the streets. How to fit into it all, how to make the most of it. How to perfect my own act, how to take my show on the road. Gradually, gradually, it occurred to me, hung around scenes from Elvis’ “Blue Hawaii” which I’d recently taken in on Turner Classic Movies, and a friend’s offhand mention of a literary reading she’d done at the Baltimore Hostel. Becoming a tour guide for visitors to the city. Stage managing small troupes of adventurers, explorers, observers, actors within the grand pageant of the city. I’ve worked up a proposal and sent it to the hostel in a multi-pronged effort also to gain international friends and contacts to help me find jobs outside of the city, state country, to prepare myself for the jump to worlds beyond, to take this Monument City and make it into a living breathing thing, to turn my own routines and patterns into something meaningful and worthwhile to other people, to make the city my stage. To make a scene.

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