Well, they did it again. The weather pundits, who had been waving their fingers and warning ominously as recently as Sunday that the DC area would get maybe 10 inches of snow, once again missed it completely.

This morning, Tuesday, there is not a drop on the ground. No snow, no sleet, no wintry mix. Nothing. There may be some during the day today. This means, of course, that we will go to school today and either drive home in a nasty, dangerous mess, or not at all.

I have to remember, when these kinds of warnings are on the horizon, how absolutely, dramatically wrong the mass-media weather prognosticators can be.

  

Nationals stadium: Half and N Streets
Originally uploaded by ShepDave.

The sign is from Monument Realty, the company developing the area closest to the new stadium. It’s going to turn a grungy neighborhood street into a snazzy retail-and-restaurant strip.

This Metro station is at Half and M Streets, SE, in Washington, DC.

As I write this, the station is actually closed for expansion, to accommodate the thousands of baseball fans who will come through it in 2008.

The stadium is one block ahead of you, at Half and N Streets.

Well, no, actually, today in the Virginia suburbs of DC it got up into the upper 70s. On our deck, when the sun hit the thermometer, it read 96 degrees at one moment.

But there’s no baseball in the newspapers. No baseball news on TV or the radio.

The St. Louis Cardinals’ great infielder Rogers Hornsby, “The Rajah,” summed up true baseball fans’ feelings when he said:

People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.

Yeah, that’s how I feel right now. Spring training starts in Florida in mid-February. Then the spring will eventually come, and baseball will be back!

During Christmas week I drove into Washington and took pictures of the construction site for the new baseball stadium:

My favorite part of this picture is the tiny bit of upper deck, on the left, where the cheap seats are being built. That’s my neighborhood, baby !

I didn’t drive into DC each and every day since I last wrote of my plans to undertake street performing; but I did go in a few more times. I figured out that the National Mall is a terrible place to do magic, because nobody expects to see you there. When people make public statements in the Monumental Core of the District of Columbia, they are generally aggrieved about some political question. That’s the kind of soapbox speaker you expect to see there–not a street magician.

I tried to move into the downtown area of the city one day, and set up my rig in a nice, shady spot at Freedom Plaza (13th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue), but didn’t really get anything going there.

After about a week off or so, I got a call from my magician friend Brian. He was calling about a restaurant gig. When I asked him what he had been up to, he said he’d been working on the street. Wow! I told him that was exactly what I’d been working on. Brian told that he usually works at the waterfront in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, where there are a lot of buskers of several types. He mentioned two other names, magician acquaintances of mine, who also worked there. Brian said that since he would be out of town for awhile, I ought to feel free to come on down.

(Brian also mentioned that the great Bob Sheets, the dean of bar magicians and a real star in the Washington area magic scene, is also working on the street. This tells me two things: everybody seems to be doing it; and I may not be magically worthy to continue. But anyway…)

This past Saturday I got my stuff together and drove down to Alexandria, where I set up at about noon. It was a hotter day than I expected. I worked for a couple hours, but it was such a hot day that I couldn’t keep a crowd. As I was leaving to go to the car, a balloon twister told me I was there too early; that I should try again at the dinner hour.

Well, I didn’t go back during the Saturday dinner hour, but I did go to the wharf yesterday, Monday evening, and worked from about 7:00 until 8:00 PM.

Miraculously, it worked.

The weather was pleasant, there was a steady stream of foot traffic (not a lot, but enough), and I tried a new bally (the kind of “step-right-up” speech carnival barkers use) to gather a crowd. Within the hour I worked, I performed a three-routine show four times.

I made $17 in the hat. That’s not great money, but that was on a Monday night in mid-August. Moreover, I drew and held rather small crowds. Here’s the wonderful part: when I did my “hat speech,” asking for money, just about all the adults went for their wallets. That is, my percentage of positive response to the hat speech was very high.

I have much to learn still, but I now know I can do this. I’m ready to get back on that horse and ride some more!

I started trying to perform street magic in Washington, DC this week.

By “street magic,” I don’t mean the kind of close-up magic David Blaine made really popular nine years ago, when he took a TV crew onto the street and filmed people’s reactions to card and coin tricks.

I mean real street magic, the kind where you do a stage show, basically, and draw a crowd, and near the end of it you do a pitch for money. The kind of street magic that has been performed for hundreds of years in Europe and the US. The loud, public kind.

I spent the last several weeks building a new performing table and building a new act (mostly routines I had done in other venues, but closing with a very strong cups-and-balls routine, Gazzo’s variation of the Dai Vernon routine). I rehearsed on video and with my in-house magical consultant, and felt that I had a reasonably strong show.

On Monday of this week, I drove into DC and headed for Dupont Circle. The neighborhood around Dupont is rather intellectual, upscale, and artsy. But I arrived at the tail-end of the lunch hour on a miserably hot day, and nobody was interested at all. After a couple hours of frustration, not having any success in attracting even a single person, I went down to the National Mall, by the Smithsonian Museums.

After driving around a bit, I got a parking spot within walking distance of the museums. I set up my rig under a tree at the Mall entrance to the Museum of Natural History. Once again, it was miserably hot, and people were tired and hungry at 2:00 PM. A couple of people stopped, and I did begin to understand the dynamic of crowd-building: capture the attention of one or two people, and six or seven others will come over to see what’s up.

But the group whose attention I got were on their way to find some food, so they left rather quickly, as soon as I turned my attention to new additions to the group. And that group hung around for two tricks, and then that was it.

Next day I picked a better spot, at the crossing to the Washington Monument, and tried a new “traffic-stopping” gimmick: a card-finding robot toy. This actually worked, somewhat: I was able to stop several people, and actually build enough of a “crowd” (maybe 10-12 people) to do most of my full-out show. But the crowd fizzled before the climax. At the end of the cups and balls trick, only two young guys were still there. They were delighted and baffled, but they were alone.

So on Tuesday I gathered a crowd of a dozen, and made one dollar.

Wednesday (yesterday) I went to the same spot on the Mall and set up, but this time was unable to stop anybody at all in two hours. I got the distinct sense that people were quite afraid to talk to me. Frustrated, I packed my hand-truck and walked off the Mall and into downtown. And instantly I realized something important.

Location is probably 90% of your success in this biz. The second I got onto the “downtown” side of the museums, the feeling was different. People were not there to make family pilgrimages to the shrines of American democracy, but rather to find a place to eat, check out the sites, buy a souvenir.

Sitting out here in the suburbs, it is very easy to go to books and tricks in my magic library and see whether I can come up with the “one trick” that will cause me to have success. I will not, of course. My problem has nothing to do with the tricks. I have a strong professional repertoire of magic that has made me much money over the past ten years.

It’s about developing enough balls, enough brass, to convince a complete stranger on the street to stop and pay attention to me for five minutes. After I’ve done that, it’s about having the non-stop energy and direct, personal engagement with this growing crowd of strangers to convince them all to stay for another 20 minutes. And then eventually to give up a couple bucks apiece.

That’s the scary part. That’s really the tallest of tall orders. Not the magic.

My wife asks me why I’m doing this, and I tell her, “I’m going to school.” I want to do this until I get it somewhat right. When I perform it’s always for somebody who has called me on the phone and contracted with me to perform for their party. If I learn how to do the street, I won’t have to wait for that call.

It’s raining today, but tomorrow (Friday) I’m going to back into town and go into town this time. It’s a bit scarier: Are the police going to run me off? Are people going to regard me as demented? Will my traffic-stopper work downtown?

Ultimately, I think, I’m doing this to confront my own fears.

I got an email from an acquaintance and Word Nerds listener yesterday, alerting me to a flap created by the brand new White House press secretary, Tony Snow. A Google News search lists a report in the ThinkProgress.org blog as the first reporter of this unfortunate gaff.

(Bizarrely enough, the Washington Post largely ignored this moment, at least in the print edition. Dana Milbank, in his gushing review of the new press secretary, mentioned in passing, deep in the middle of his column, that Snow “risked some loaded language.” According to the Post website, this piece appeared on page A2 of the print edition, although I did not see it. A more critical piece by Dan Froomkin appeared only on washingtonpost.com, not in the print edition.)

In his very first briefing Tuesday, Snow casually used the term “hug the tar baby,” apparently to refer to refer to what might more neutrally be termed a “sticky situation.” His reference seemed to be to an old children’s story by Joel Chandler Harris, in which Brer Rabbit tricks Brer Fox into hugging a baby made out of tar, and thereby traps his nemesis the fox.

However, it is probably more commonly understood in American discourse as a racial slur, a very rude term for African Americans.

The thread of comments on ThinkProgress.org (at the time of this writing already numbering 291 comments) shows how racially charged this careless use of language is. While a lot commenters claim the whole flap is an instance of political correctness run amok, many others hear in the off-hand remarks by this occasional substitute for Rush Limbaugh an extraordinary insensitivity to the perception of this phrase.

Even if Snow was only thinking of the Brer Rabbit story, which is generally perceived nowadays to be somewhat racist on its own, he seems to have a tin ear when it comes to hearing the voice and lexicon of 21st-century America.

Race is still the big taboo of American life. This country, which was founded on a slave economy, is still trying, 142 years after our Civil War, to figure out who we are and how we should talk to each other. The Word Nerds did a show recently on Race and Language in which we tried to explore the edges of this taboo zone. In the back of our minds, Howard Chang and I know that there is a wide spectrum of possible reaction to racially charged speech, from very sensitive to very thick-skinned.

But whether you think the uproar is obviously justified or is a case of exaggerated political correctness, one would have to acknowledge that the choice of the term “tar baby” was a rather bizarre turn of phrase for Snow to use on his very first day on the job in front of the White House press corps. Whether Snow was subconsciously using the phrase as a racial slur or simply recalling the Brer Rabbit story, there is no way he should have let it pass his lips.

In our podcast, Howard Chang introduced the concept of “homophonic creep,” which is what happens when words that sound like offensive words become taboo, just because of their sound. One very well known example is a controversy in the Washingtron, DC local government in 1999 over the use of the non-offensive term niggardly.

But the Tony Snow flap this week is nothing like that. “Tar baby” is either a nasty racial slur, or else it’s a plot feature in a story that no one tells any longer because of its racial overtones. It is certainly not a phrase any educated public speaker should get away with using nowadays.

Certainly not a White House press secretary.

For the first time in my life, within the past week I attended two, count ‘em, two major-league baseball games. Because I was sitting both times in my season-ticket seats, I now truly feel like a baseball geek.

I must state, here at the very beginning of this post, the unpleasant fact that the Washington Nationals lost both games I saw. Against two of the palooka teams of the National League East–the Florida Marlins and the Pittsburgh Pirates–the Nats went down to defeat.

(Since then the Nats have beaten Pittsburgh once at home and Cincinnati once on the road.)

But there was good news, too–more important than wins and losses. After something like 17 months of procrastinating, Major League Baseball awarded the right to purchase the team to a group of investors led by Ted Lerner, a local developer with very deep pockets. The announcement was made late in the day on Wednesday. We halfway expected to see the Lerners at the ballpark on Wednesday, but they didn’t come until Thursday evening.

Then on Thursday morning, ground was broken for the new stadium. Many DC politicians, including race-baiters-come-lately Marion Barry and Vincent Orange, participated in this event. The Lerners were at the park on Thursday to watch the Nationals lose again.

Friday the Nats began a series against the Pittsburgh Pirates (even worse than the Florida Marlins) with a decisive win, 6-0. I had high hopes when I went to the stadium on Saturday to see game two against the Pirates. But no, after the batters got the score to 3-0 in favor of the Nationals after two innings, pitcher Ramon Ortiz gave up the entire lead before he was pulled from the game. Our guys ended up losing 5-4.

What does it mean that we will now have an owner? Most importantly, it will mean that our team is not owned by the other 29 teams in Major League Baseball. That is the status quo. The sale to the Lerner group will not be finally closed until mid-June. This means that for another whole month, the Nats are quite literally owned by the other team every time they play.

Most people I know are very excited about this new ownership group. The group centers on a business-oriented family that is very wealthy. They are a local family, which means there is no reason to worry that the team will leave DC any time in the foreseeable future. They are joined by Stan Kasten, who turned the Atlanta Braves into “America’s team” in the late 1980s-early 1990s.

In a way this feels like we have become subjects of a benevolent princely family of sport. But there’s nothing wrong with that. I’ll be a happy subject.

RFK stadium, sec. 417, row 3, seat 4 (rail in foreground)
Originally uploaded by ShepDave.

This is a view of the Nats/Orioles game from my regular season seat. At this point in the game, the Orioles were being put out 1-2-3 in the top of the ninth inning. But the damage had been done. The O’s won, 9-6.

Categories: baseball, nationals, washington-dc, flickr

Musings and thoughts on the Battle of the Beltway game at RFK Stadium between the Nationals and the Baltimore Orioles:

• I had a great seat in section 422 for this game, but I made a point to look at the field from my season ticket seat in 417. We’ve got the third row. It will be great, but we may try to upgrade next year to move closer to home and (more importantly) up at least one or two rows, to take the rail out of the picture.
• The Nationals lost. At least one guy on the ballparkguys.com discussion board was very incensed about this. Most of the rest of us, though, just enjoyed being at the stadium. The Nationals are going to lose a lot this year–they have no owner yet, so they have no budget to acquire players, plus a lame-duck management staff. We’ll live.
• This was a two-game exhibition series. Friday night was in DC, Saturday late afternoon in Baltimore. It was a little disappointing to see only about 19,000 people in RFK for the Friday game–until we saw the attendance for Saturday’s game in Baltimore. It was 11,000 and something, and I’ve heard tell that many of those people were Nationals fans. Moreover, we in DC paid full price for tickets to this practice game, while the Orioles sold their tickets for $10. It’s clear to me who the real fans are.

Go Nationals! Opening day of the season is tomorrow (Monday), in New York against the NY Mets. Opening day at home is Tuesday, April 11. We have tickets for Wednesday the 12th, against the Mets. I can hardly wait!

Categories: baseball, nationals, washington-dc