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Some little black boys trickled into the frame, four or five of them, perhaps those who ofttimes can be seen tap-dancing or bamboozling up & down the drag.  But other business was afoot as they commenced with mimicking the mimic, with spoofing the spoofer, and nimbly stole the scene.  My party, lulled by the sun’s warmth and the interplay of faint strains of jazz wafting up from here & yon, lolled watching from our aerie, casually following the comedic camaraderie of the street guild.  Ahh, here was the real deal, les bontemps, the essence of the famed locale.  Snapshots for the great collective mental scrapbook.  My friends would tote home a billowing satisfaction of experience and a powerful appreciation for my insider-savvy re where ya go to catch the Big Easy tabasco on a Saturday afternoon.  A studied visage of nonchalance masked my inner exultation.  

Boom!  Suddenly like thunder Marcel blows his stack and every mind along the balconies & down on the baked bricks.  "STOP F****ING WITH ME!  GO F*** WITH SOMEONE ELSE!"  The compromised mime, beyond livid, was hunched over his diminutive tormentors—no pals of his, after all—crimson emanations searing the air about his rage-engorged, whitewashed mug.  For a few moments that seemed like a few moments more, dead silence ruled the rue (necroquietarchy, experts on tyranny would suggest).  The urchins, I don't recall if they held or gave ground, but the clumps of onlookers dislodged and dissolved into a rather New Yorkish pedestrian flow.  From some den appeared a man in a suit who spoke a few quiet words to the broken expressionist and departed.  The painted one collected his cup and traveling gear off the sidewalk and, making like the Little Tramp, padded off into…  The End. 

Tic-toc to another few moments, now for reflection— what has just happened?— and exchanging long looks.  Someone cracked and we burst into laughter so hard and protracted that I pray the balcony bolts were checked before any subsequent patrons were permitted entry. 

[P.S.  Now you may say, what if the fellow— maybe not a pro at all, maybe some momma’s-only-son who failed to make the mark— was at the end of his rope, and the New Orleans gambit was his final lunge for life before he sank down alone beside Lake Pontchartrain and ate a bullet?  I guess that makes us jackals, but you just don’t think of everything right away.  Nor, thinking of it later, can we permit our right high spirits to be larruped by evil speculations.  Certainly not.  Let’s leave this one in the “bravo!” column.]  

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Copyright 2007- WJ Schafer & WC Smith - All Rights Reserved

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The Journal of Provincial Thought

One summer the wife & I were doing the town with a couple of upcountry friends, stretched back sipping sippers on a balcony overhanging a sour, steamy French Quarter street, when we espied a mime down below bedeviling tourists, introducing them to the Tate twins Imi- and Irri-. Some victims gamely feigned exasperation upon realizing they were being shadowed, and much hay he made of that.  Some were nonplussed, and of that he likewise made his hay.  He baled too the hay of others who pointedly ignored him.  Accomplished mimes, masters of pushing a perspective, and the most tenacious of God’s presenting creatures, don’t play to lose.  Knots of bystanders were tinkling his cup at a brisk clip.  On the face of things this was vintage Nawlins sidewalk entrepreneurism, art for profit’s sake, Quarter style. 

Renowned mime Marcel Marceau, born Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg, died September 22, 2007. He was 84. His legendary name, synonymous with the modern mime prototype, is playfully hung upon the performer in this letter. —Eds.

June 22, 2007—The Question of Life Irritating Art

What's Yours Is Mime

Admiral,

Let me tell you this about New Orleans.  I'll never forget it, but I'll often forget to mention it.