It’s been a while since I’ve sat down to write a post. My deep dark secret of marketing is new folks on the list get every email I ever wrote eventually. Folks who’ve been here a while and aren’t on the weekly train anymore will only get updates like this.
So, what have I been doing with my life? I went to Seattle this summer and went up the Space Needle with my family in addition to that glass blowing museum. I got to say, the outdoor garden on the grounds of the museum looks like a Star Trek set with alien plants growing everywhere. I’m not an art critic, but it’s a cool place.
I also like seeing the street performers who are living their artist dream no matter how peculiar, by doing performance art and Seattle had a lot of them. The city had your standard ones like the electric violin player you get in almost every city to the robot guy dressed with metallic paint. If there was an award for robot guy performance art, I think Seattle is winning this one, or at least a contender.
The guy had a kinda weird uncle sam/eighties action hero getup complete with oversized rifle gun, but that wasn’t what made him stick out. While I’m sure Hulk Hogan dressed in metallic paint would stick out in a crowd, this guy took it one step further, he added an auditory experience to the act when he moved. Being a man dressed as a robot, you’d think it would be a pneumatic hiss or grinding of servos, but no, it was a squeaky toy.
So picture a Hulk Hogan looking like dude dressed as a eighties action American hero robot, but with squeaky sounds when he moved around. I don’t think I ever witnessed a robot quirk like it. My son, who’s nine and once criticized Metallica’s One during the heaviest metal moment of all heavy metal history by asking (when does the song start rocking?), wasn’t a fan of the man. When the bot man tried to engage my son with his squeaky antics, my kid frowned and went the other way.
Still, I got to say, I’ve seen people dressed as robots, but none quite like the guy outside the Space Needle in Seattle.
He still doesn’t hold a candle to my favorite street performer of all time, The Famous Bushman of Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. That was a dude who just held a tree branch in front of his face and jumped out and scared people. Trust me when I say he wasn’t that well-hidden, but man when we ate at a restaurant and happened to get a table overlooking where the guy was “hiding” that day, it was one of the more amusing dining experiences of my life.
Get your copy of Whimsical Death and Other Pirating Dangers!