Bards of the boardwalk

Boston and Cambridge street performers entertain with music, magic, and plenty of talent

by Shirley Zilberstein

There's something in the air right now -- call it summer -- that draws herds of people onto the sidewalks each night in search of a good show. And once they're on those sidewalks, the pointing and staring and gawking begin. It's peak season for street performance, and Boston is -- in the words of Patricia Campbell, author of Passing the Hat: Street Performers in America (Delacorte) -- the Emerald City of sidewalk artists.

The street musicians, clowns, and visual artists in Boston and Cambridge are as varied as their reasons for planting themselves on a certain slab of pavement. There are part-timers with schoolwork to run home to or jobs to wake up for; there are full-timers whose daily lives are often ruled by the moods of passing police officers. But all of them, whatever their location and performance style, can hear the pulse of the city a little louder than we can.

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Karen and
Debbie Billmers, 16
Violinists, Harvard Square

They're new to these streets. And young. So young that people stop and turn to take a second look -- now, this is something different.

Karen and Debbie, 16-year-old identical twins from Lexington, share the same wide blue eyes, the same confident air, and the same love of Scottish folk music. They've both been playing the violin for eight years, and last month they took their fiddles to the street for the first time.

"Our parents wanted us to do something productive with our summers," says Karen Billmers. "We've lived in Lexington and Arlington our whole lives, and we go to Harvard Square a lot, and we'd always see other street performers there. And I guess it just occurred to us that we could go."

The two stand in front of the Harvard Coop -- the spot where Tracy Chapman got her start -- looking completely fearless. Their eyes trail after passersby, and their feet, strapped in Teva sandals, tap the sidewalk in time to their jigs and reels.

The scariest part of performing on the street -- actually, the only scary part -- is "starting," says Karen. Her sister Debbie calls it "fear of rejection." It's that moment when they have to stop in the middle of the sidewalk, alter the traffic flow, and turn the street into their stage.

"I guess when we start tuning, people realize that we want space on the sidewalk," explains Karen. "And we'll be like, 'Ready, go!' and we'll play a tune and someone will just sit down and listen, and once somebody's there it will attract some attention."

Their mother, Laura Billmers, told them they had to play enough to repay their $40 street-performance permits, and they did -- in two days. In their first week of performing, the girls earned an average of $50 per two-hour day; they've also been offered a couple of gigs and have delved into some interesting musical discussions with strangers.

But this is still strictly a summer job.

"I think by the time I'm getting a professional job, it wouldn't be street performing," says Karen. "It's one of those things that are fun to do when you're a kid and it's summer and you're just fooling around, because you probably can't depend on it much. But for a summer job, it's really great because you can make your own hours."

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Michael Ford, 24
Magician/comedian,
Faneuil Hall

He has the look of a frustrated British banker, the type Mary Poppins would love to tame -- hair streaming sweat under a black bowler hat, round face growing redder by the minute. But then that Boston accent gives him away.

Michael Ford in a straitjacket is a sight -- loud, ferociously excited, and surrounded by a thick crowd of toddlers and tourists suspended in a messy mix of fear, curiosity, empathy, and greed. He's betting them money he can get out of this one.

With one second to spare on his 30-second timer, Ford forces the straitjacket over his head and flings it to the sidewalk, panting and smiling and choking on adrenaline. His audience bursts into applause, fills two bowler hats with money, and goes home questioning its reliance on the criminal-justice system.

They probably don't imagine that on most days, this guy wears a different kind of suit to work. Ford is a third-year law student at Suffolk University and is also serving a clerkship in a downtown law office. His magic and comedy show, which he's been performing in front of Faneuil Hall a couple of times a month for seven years now, is his study break.

"This is a fantastic way to blow off steam, to get rid of stress," he says. "Law school's a lot of stress."

Performing -- on the street in summer, in theaters during the winter -- has helped Ford put himself through school. Today, he says, he's working in one of New England's two best outdoor money-making spots. (The other is Harvard Square.)

Faneuil Hall Marketplace is regulated not by the City of Boston, but by the Rouse Company, a private developer, which auditions performers each year and schedules them into two-hour slots. Although many "real performers" frown on the idea of being scheduled, Ford says he prefers it this way. "I'd rather just come in, know what time I'm performing, bang, do it, then go home, see my wife," he says.

But after this summer, Ford says, he'll be "hanging up [his] straitjacket as far as street performance goes" and making law his full-time act.

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Mare Streetpeople, 40
Folksinger, MBTA

Like a jewel accidentally on display in a subway station, Mare Streetpeople stuns people. It's evident in their faces.

She sits on a bench in the Downtown Crossing MBTA station as another Orange Line train stops and spills yet another load of morning commuters onto the platform. They leave the train, and suddenly their pace slows a bit and their glances turn to stares as they notice Streetpeople at her microphone. Her eyes are closed; her strong, tanned fingers grip her guitar; her lips emit folksy gospel songs in a sweet, deep alto voice. It's not hard to imagine that voice floating across a giant concert pavilion, yet she performs sitting against an MBTA map. Exiting the train, women in suits lose their focus and turn their heads; boys in basketball sneakers silence each other and listen.

"You've got the voice of an angel!" says one man, as he catches Streetpeople on her break.

"I have people telling me every day, 'You should be on the radio, you should be on television,' " Streetpeople says, resting her bare feet on top of her worn Birkenstocks. She's done that, with an appearance on CNN and performances in concert halls and coffeehouses. And there was that period when she was known in the folk scene for her Janis Joplin impersonation. But her name has yet to turn up much in places where folks have never heard of the MBTA. "I guess I need an agent or someone who can put their foot in the door," she says.

There's no resentment or regret in her voice. For 20 years, playing in the MBTA and sometimes on the sidewalk, Streetpeople has made a comfortable living. On a good day she can make $100 here; on a bad day, she says, she'll make less than $50.

"I live in a regular neighborhood, and I work very hard to live there," she says. "Very hard" means she gets little fresh air, is slowly losing her hearing from the constant screeching of trains braking on the tracks, feels her muscles cramp from sitting in the same spot for hours, and endures occasional harassment.

But performing down in the T does have its advantages. "I get a lot of gigs out of it," says Streetpeople, who makes about a quarter of her income from coffeehouse and festival appearances. She refers to her underground playing as a live audition. "I make myself known by what I do. Just to send tapes out blindly doesn't get you anywhere."

Another plus is the people, the pleasantly distracted T passengers who stand before her and stare, sometimes purposely missing their trains just to keep watching her. "Even if I made it I would come down here," she says. "The people appreciate it."

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Denis Rafael Zevallos, 26
Guitarist/flutist,
Downtown Crossing

The young musician has moved again. First there was the trip from Peru to Miami 10 years ago; then the move from Miami to Boston five years later; now he's moving across town because he's been evicted -- not from his apartment, but from his performance spot.

Denis Rafael Zevallos and his South American band, Gitano -- a trio with flutes, guitars, and percussion -- began playing at Downtown Crossing two years ago. They play a variety of South American and some contemporary flamenco music, not far from the Spanish/Inca fusion that has become nearly ubiquitous around Boston and Cambridge in the past several years. "Ten years ago, if there'd be a band of Latin American music playing, they'd make money," Zevallos says. "But now it's not so mystical anymore."

Since he and his band started performing, he says, they have been approached daily by Boston police officers and told to leave. Each day Zevallos and his fellow musicians fished out their permits to prove they could play, and each day they were nonetheless told they were performing at the wrong time or standing in the wrong spot. Finally, last month, they packed up their amplifier and instruments and left Downtown Crossing for good. Currently, their stage is an outdoor spot outside the Aquarium, where the management has given them permission to perform and the police let them be, for now.

Zevallos calls Boston "the most artistic part of the whole country," but he worries whether city officials really appreciate what they have. "I think Boston is getting too strict with musicians in the street," says Zevallos. "I think they just want to clean the streets of it."

Reading the law isn't much help. Performance downtown is governed by Rule 75 of the Boston Police Order, which was written in the 19th century and covers a stretch of the city bordered by specific streets and squares, some of which no longer exist. Performers within that area are restricted to the hours of 6 to 9 p.m.; the law also states that performers must undergo an audition for the right to play on the street.

"That law might be on the books," says Lieutenant James Curran, commander of the licensing unit at the Boston Police Department. "It's not enforced."

"Last time I know it was updated is probably 1950," he says. "Before that, who the hell really knows?"

Rule 75 puts performers like Gitano in a sticky situation. "Even though we have a permit, sometimes they come and they say, `Even though you have a permit, you can't play here,' " says Zevallos.

"This one really does need some updating, and we're looking into updating it," says Curran. "It's going to happen. Do we sit around and talk about it a lot? No. In the last two months, have we said stuff about it? Yes." Curran says it won't be until after Labor Day, but the police department does plan to sit down with its legal division, its licensing unit, and performers and rewrite the rule.

Zevallos says he would eagerly join that discussion. Until then, he's playing the Aquarium by day, painting by night, and mulling over a move to Europe, where art, he says, is better understood.

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Stephen Baird, 50
Folksinger and advocate

Stephen Baird could be sitting in the sun right now, with a circle of listeners around him. After all, he's been playing his guitar and singing in the streets for almost 30 years. He still performs, but these days Baird can usually be found in his Jamaica Plain home office -- an ornamented little museum of street performance history -- where he plays godfather, mentor, and legal advocate to the 30,000 folksingers and street performers he has on his computer database from around the world.

The tiny, bearded, jovial Baird has founded a host of support networks and advocacy groups for street artists, organizations like the Folk Arts Network and the Street Performers' Guild (which later became the Street Artists' Guild and then the Street Arts Advocates). It may be hard to keep track of all the names, but one thing's clear: when cities pass new street-performance policies, Baird's name is usually attached to them.

Baird's activism began in the late 1960s, when the radical college kid with a guitar found himself continually harassed by police, who rousted him for panhandling whenever he passed the hat. In 1972 he threatened to sue the city, and a year later Boston began allowing street performers to collect money from their audiences. A year after that, the city gave Baird a license -- in the form of a golden badge -- to play on the sidewalk.

Since then, Baird, who considers street performance a First Amendment right, has taken the fight from city to city. In 1984, he helped Chicago performers push an ordinance through the city council; in 1990, he helped rewrite Cambridge's street-performance laws into something approaching his idea of a "model ordinance."

Cambridge's law, which Baird again helped revise in 1996, allows performance throughout the entire city, but regulates hours and noise level to keep neighbors happy. His success in Cambridge and Chicago has helped him develop similar plans elsewhere; his tactic is to start with a model ordinance -- something like Cambridge's -- and work with local artists to tailor it and lobby City Hall for passage.

"Normally you have to get a community of artists that supports you, and you try to get the arts councils and all the cultural institutions to support you," Baird explains. "And then you try to get the newspapers, because it's a free-speech issue. It normally takes a year or two years to fight the battle."

And how do you get a bunch of artsy anarchists to attend a meeting?

"I just do potluck dinners," Baird says. "The way you get people together is you feed them. I don't try to organize them unless there's turmoil, unless there's an outside battle."

In Boston, Baird would like to see a Cambridge-style ordinance passed in place of the archaic Rule 75. He's lobbying people to elect a city councilor, or even a mayor, who will support a new ordinance. Otherwise, he's doing what a good mentor does, and is waiting for a performer with an "enlightened self-interest" to approach him for guidance.

"I find people whose issue is being threatened and make them the leader in the fight," Baird explains. "And I sit in the background and help them."

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Mark Farneth, 40
Juggler, Harvard Square

The summer skyline of Cambridge used to look a little different, partly because on warm summer nights, walking around Harvard Square, you could usually expect to see flaming torches periodically fly up toward the sky. Those were part of Mark Farneth's "Can Do" juggling show, a daredevil act filled with balancing tricks, rope walking, and, most notably, fire juggling, which Farneth had been performing on Brattle Street for 14 years.

No longer. Children who catch him walking down the street and yell, "Hey, that's the fire guy!" must now be corrected, because Cambridge's fire officials -- with the help of the Cambridge Arts Council -- have begun cracking down on open flames. So these days, the master of fire is juggling knives instead.

"Now I have machetes -- how familiar," Farneth jokes. "They're in everybody's box, and whoever's box they're not in, they have been." But Farneth says there's still a little heat left. "I rely on my personal fire, which has always accompanied that external flame. . . . I have a kind of zaniness of character that I present in my show. The fire was a sort of graceful introduction to me."

Like Farneth, many members of the street-performance community found out about the open-flame rule in mid-May, but Cambridge's fire regulation is so old that even officials at the Fire Department don't know when it was written. "The regulations haven't changed," explains Deputy Fire Chief James Harrington. "We're just enforcing them."

Farneth, for one, says he's not going to allow the art of fire juggling to be snuffed out so easily: "Fire is such a primal draw."

"It's startling that they put a blind eye to it for so long and suddenly we're affected so profoundly," he says. In the last few months, Farneth says, he's been "making a concerted effort" to leave the streets "because of things like this," and says he'd like to focus on his private gigs instead.

But first, he does want to see some changes made. His next step is to initiate a discussion with the Fire Department, or even make this political and go to City Hall. Stephen Baird will help out, and other performers may lend their support, but this could very well be yet another steep balancing act Farneth has to perform on his own.

Shirley Zilberstein can be reached at shirleyz@sas.upenn.edu.