The Man In Red

Lovey spring day. Another afternoon walkabout downtown in Dublin. There was a real summery buzz on Grafton Street, the hub of Dublin's shopping district. I spent a little while chatting with a street performer called Shah, a monocycling limbo-dancer (I think), relaxing before his performance. He let me take a few shots. They were okay, and I'll email him a couple. But I didn't expect them to be good enough for a blip. And I was right. It may have be that he was just too relaxed, too at home in himself, an admirable quality, but I wanted some drama, some tension.

There were quite a few street-performers around, mime-artists, shape-throwers of every colour. These our our standard-bearers, our outward sign-makers; but we are all street-performers, even if our performance consists of making ourselves as invisible as possible.

I was passing a little group of godheads dressed in snazzy red fleece jackets, a kind of informal blazer. They called themselves, according to a sandwich board, 'The Word On The Street' (as if there was only one). The young man in the D.H. Lawrence beard caught my attention. He was wrapped up securely in his diatribe, not screaming fire and brimstone, but simply reading aloud from a bible, raising his voice just a few notches, hoping (presumably) to hook the interest of passsers by. He hoooked me alright. And he didn't seem to mind my shooting about seven or eight frames. I was barely there, I think, on the periphery of his own frame of reference, an eddy in the crowd-stream.