The Take Away

In all of the years I spent wandering around the Minnesota Renaissance Festival with a dirty face and shit-brown costume I am fortunate that I can count on one hand the number of times someone has threatened to kill me. Now, that may seem to be a roughly high number since I’m guessing few of you have had someone threaten to kill you as a result of something you said. Not so with me. Some things I’ve said have resulted in a bit of blow back, an unexpected rebuttal to what I believed was a joke. I don’t believe I had necessarily said anything wrong, but that I said it to the wrong person. Got it.

My risky brand of performing is one in which the “scene” is not figured ahead of time, not really, it’s mostly a series of improvised provocations designed to incite. I gather a crowd by harassing them with a sort of free association, comedic rant on everything around me. My personae is the Rat Catcher, a kind of medieval Don Rickles lambasting everything and everyone around him. I’ve performed for hundreds of thousands of people over the past 47 years (Yes..I started as a kid), and in only a few instances has someone objected to my comments in a potentially violent way, and most of those happened in Texas. Surprise!

The most caustic of them was an oddly shaped guy (See…already you know this is going in a bad direction) who was ordering pasta from one of the festival food booths. I was sitting on the ground near the counter of the booth, and as he waited for his food I might have mentioned something about his bulging gut and overworked duodenum. He ignored me, which is appropriate in most cases but seeing as this is “interactive theater” I was inclined to follow up on my opening salvo. Just as I stood up, this enormous bowl of hot pasta with red sauce appeared on the counter. I said something that included “shoveling” and “fat, obnoxious ignoramus.” But, I delivered it with a smile.

Much to my surprise, it turns out, a plate of hot pasta and red sauce in the face followed by a verbal threat that my life was in danger of coming to a hasty close, was an early curtain due to bad reviews for those of you familiar with the nomenclature of the theater. The man was quickly escorted off the site by a couple of beefy, thick necked cowboy security guys who were fans of my performance style. I was told later that the man got a little rowdy on the walk out and the cowboys had to “set him straight”. I never found out what that meant…somethings are better left alone.

The fact that I’ve only had a handful of troubled moments given the enormous number of people that I have interacted with as an “improvocative” performer, tells me that most of us have great leeway in how we approach encounters with others. Certainly there are a different set of social rules when performing, yet, playing and engaging others creates a great deal of space for exploring and tinkering with the moments. Regardless of what you do, in most instances if you’re paying attention, you can engage with others with far more vim and vigor than you might think. What’s more, if you do it with patience, love and kindness, you’ll find that others not only want to play with you, but they’ll pay extra to get it.

Okay, I know you can’t go around yelling at others or provoking pasta eaters, but you can move boldly in the world by inviting people to play with you, to engage with them wholeheartedly and to do so not because it’s a strategy for getting something, but that it raises the level of good for you, for them, and for this bruised and battered world.