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A growing trend summons up a delicious memory

By Ed Goldman

The ability to juggle, literally and figuratively, is having its moment. 

Street performers (like jugglers) are suddenly making OK dough in urban centers, where the municipality or business property owners might pay them as much as $200 for a lunchtime gig and even allow them to keep any tips they receive (which usually were all the performers made for their efforts). 

At the same time, people who know how to juggle addresses—theirs and those of homeowners with whom they swap properties for vacations, sabbaticals and, presumably, the federal Witness Protection Program—are enjoying a vogue similar to Airbnb operators. The major exception is that while renting out your so-called mother-in-law cottage provides some decent income (unless you rent it to your mother-in-law), trading households doesn’t.

That could change, one supposes, if you had a very modest home in a desirable location and you wished to exchange five nights there with somebody who owns a villa in Tuscany. One of you should probably toss some incentive dollars into the deal, wouldn’t you say? 

But it may not be obvious which one of you could owe the other some cash incentivizing. After all, your modest place may be a few blocks from where the Oscars show is beamed, as well as have three Starbucks within walking distance. Whereas, that magnificent Tuscan villa may be miles away from anything tourism-friendly. While the trade-off to me would be obvious—who needs a coffee shop when you can spend from dawn to dusk just eyeballing a serene, seemingly endless landscape?—I know someone who owns a beautiful home on the English countryside who says she goes “stir crazy” unless she ventures into the choking bustle and costliness of London a couple of times each year.  

But let’s get back to the sudden ascension of street jugglers (in London, they’re called “buskers,” by the way, and they’ve been performing there for centuries).  

If you’ve traveled to, or live in or near, a metropolitan milieu, you’ve no doubt encountered jugglers, mimes, guitarists, flautists, violinists, classical-music quartets, singers, modern-dancers and preachers. They usually work between the hours of 11:30 a.m. and 2 p.m., which covers most office workers’ and visitors’ lunchtimes—but rarely the performers’ rent. That’s apparently changing, according to The Wall Street Journal and other media, which report that well-situated minstrels, mimes or whatever can earn a few grand per month plying their trade or plucking their harps for passersby.

To be sure, many people find street performers irritating—just as neighboring homeowners may not like the fact that the house next door features a revolving front door. In both cases, you’re being more or less forced to put up with strangers, some of whom will speak in tongues at variance to yours.

At one of the first apartments I rented, at the back of a little courtyard in Long Beach, I had only one neighbor across the hall. He traveled a lot and for some reason, kept finding Vietnamese families who wanted to rent his place, sometimes for weeks at a time.

Since I lived alone, I’d grown accustomed to its being pretty quiet in the little building in the rear of the courtyard, one that may have been built as an after-thought in the early 1920s. Suddenly having a family with a husband, wife, assorted siblings and children across the hall was at first pretty daunting. These were the years I was first plying my craft on a fulltime basis (writing, if you’d be so kind), subsisting on what I’d saved during my two-plus years as a newspaper reporter and the felicity of student loans I kept adding onto as I (sometimes) attended journalism, English and drama classes at Long Beach State University. 

The noise would start at dawn but always end at 9 p.m. sharp. Maybe the family had collective jet lag. In any event, it’s what contributed to my becoming a night owl because the guests’ schedule allowed me to work each night from their bedtime to about 3 a.m. 

I slept blissfully through their early-morning clamor and all was good. Then they must have got new arrivals or just adjusted to their new schedule and their nights expanded. One night it got so loud I knocked on the door to see what was up. When my temporary neighbor opened it, I saw about five of the residents sitting on an open sofa bed examining jade and other necklaces. They’d turned the apartment into a live-work/black-market bazaar. 

But they were very nice about it and assured me the noise level would soon diminish since they were running out of merch and their travel visas were set to expire.

I was relieved—until one night, as I climbed the stairs to my place, the mouth-watering aroma of Vietnamese food filled the hallway. I smelled fish frying, chicken steaming, pork stewing and vegetables and soups boiling all at once, as though I was standing outside a gourmet Asian restaurant.