One night last week I had dinner with friends in Provincetown. Afterwards we debated whether to go out to Herring Cove to watch the Perseid meteor shower or to stroll along the circus midway that is Commercial Street in August.
We chose Commercial Street as having the more spectacular and exotic display. The drag queens with their eighteen-inch high spiked red hair and six-inch platform shoes are still diverting, but they have become familiar, even comfortable sights, part of the expected “summer scene” in P-Town. But the sight of two middle-aged, balding, slightly paunchy men in white T-shirts and shorts walking along the street holding hands - that still blows me away – the ordinariness of it – and I can’t even begin to think what it means to them.
There was a crowd gathered around one of the benches – the so-called “meat rack” – in front of town hall. The attraction was a mime, a rather tall woman dressed and performing as an automaton, or a robotic rag doll: She looked like Raggedy-Ann on steroids. She wore a frizzy red wig, a face painted white with rose cheek spots, a polka-dotted blouse and white gloves, a short pink skirt and blue-and-white horizontally-striped stockings. She had a noisemaking device that produced an impressive variety of mechanical whirring and whizzing sounds that she coordinated with her automaton movements.
She was quite good, admirably convincing and totally in character, and it was captivating to watch how she made “mechanical” movements and gestures seem even more expressive than “natural” ones. The emotions she expressed were somehow heightened by their artificiality. But what was most fascinating were the reactions of her audience. She sat on the bench with some adult tourists, playing to them, and they in turn reacted with self-conscious, uncomfortable gestures, much to the delight of the small children looking on – three and four-year-olds, mostly. Fascinated, they lay on the sidewalk with their heads propped up in their hands, their lower legs bent backwards, dangling up in the air. They laughed loudly, uproariously, at the clown’s antics and the grownups’ growing discomfort.
The mime’s countenance, expressions and gestures were all benign and friendly, but when she turned her gaze directly towards the young kids lying on the sidewalk just a few yards away, they suddenly panicked and fled, just as they would have if a movie monster had stepped out of the screen and had started walking directly at them. There was a seven or eight-year-old girl there with her mother, snapping photographs. When the automaton started walking toward her, she backed up suddenly into her mother’s arms, a look of total panic on her face, and began crying, leaving the mime with a mock-quizzical, mock-regretful expression.
We like our fantasies at a safe distance, or at least at someone else’s expense.
