San Diego’s Big Show : Balboa Park a Mecca for Entertainers

He weaves across the plaza on a 6-foot unicycle, juggling a couple of flaming torches. Behind him, the wedding cake facade of Balboa Park’s Natural History museum soars into a sky that is the improbable blue of a post card. A child about 6, watching open-mouthed, lets his ice cream plop onto the sun-warmed pink tiles.

Ron Pearson, 20, is a street performer. A juggler. He earns his living doing it. He is a street performer of the ‘80s, with an answering machine, Blue Cross insurance and a girlfriend who keeps trying to get him to eat vegetables.

“If you’re talented enough to be one of us, you also have to have the stupidity,” he said, laughing. “Look, two hands--no brain! But I’m happy. Definitely.”

His weeks are usually awash with variety. Juggling bowling balls at a mall opening, talking to a high school class on the psychology of attracting crowds, doing a Friday night show at Los Angeles’ Variety Arts Theatre.

But on most Saturdays and Sundays, Pearson gets up while it is still dark to line up with other performers until the gates of Balboa Park open to them at 7 a.m. (He also has some weekends scheduled at Sea World.)

“The park doesn’t charge for its permits. It issues them on a daily basis and, out of about 17 or 18 spots, there are really only three good ones for an act like mine,” he said. “There’s the spot beside the fountain. The square where I am now. And one by the lily pond. They’re allotted on a first-come, first-served basis.”

A predominantly male occupation (Balboa Park has only one regular female performer, Zu Zu the Balloon Lady), open-air performing is enjoying a renaissance, Pearson said.

A Busy Day

“People like live entertainment,” he said. There is, he explained, an energy that passes between an audience and a performer close enough to touch. “Live shows are much more exciting.”

Pearson does about three shows a day. At the end of each hourlong performance, he urges the crowd to “put $2 or $3 in the hat, folks, as this is how we earn our living.”

On a “big” day, when there are holiday crowds, he does as many as six shows, juggling his flaming torches until the sky darkens.

“No wonder he’s in such good shape,” a woman in the crowd murmurs, watching as he kneels, bending backward. His cropped blond hair almost brushes the tiles. The five glittering white and silver clubs he is juggling belong to a friend. (His own were recently stolen from the back of his car.)

“I’ve been performing in the streets since I was 10,” he tells the crowd.

Sue Hunt, a professional clown who belongs to a troupe of street performers in Pearson’s home town of Seattle, taught him the basics 10 years ago.

“I was in high school before I mastered juggling five clubs,” he said. “And learning how to kick a 12-pound bowling ball up over my head took even longer!”

After high school, he spent two years studying business and finance at the University of Washington, juggling--weather permitting--in the streets at night.

“Ten to midnight on Seattle’s Broadway. Right between two bars.”

It was, he recalls, rather a lively spot in which to perform.

“One night I was doing my routine of juggling a machete and a bowling ball, while simultaneously popping a ping pong ball in and out of my mouth, and a drunk tried to take the machete away from me. I had to leave the crowd and run!”

Balboa Park is a dazzling backdrop, a far cry from the midnight streets of Seattle. Since moving to San Diego in October, his skin and hair have been sun-toasted to almost the same shade of dark gold.

He grins at a row of small children sitting on a stone bench as he scoops up three wicked-looking machetes. A long white scar on his left index finger is a reminder of the day his attention wandered for an instant.

“Don’t try this,” he tells the children as he flings the first machete into the air. “I’m a professional .”

Several hundred yards away, under the trees opposite the Organ Pavilion, another professional is giving a performance. Jamey Turner is playing Bach’s arrangement of “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring” on 50 water-filled brandy glasses.

Turner’s hands--with palms flat, backs curved--stroke across the glass rims. The water quivers and shimmers as the sweet, clear notes rise into the trees. The crowd is quiet. Many are sitting on the grass, their faces rapt under the dappling leaf shadows.

“It’s the tonal quality that fascinates them,” Turner said. He has been involved with music as far back as he can remember and plays the clarinet, the harp, and the musical saw. (A wrench harp he invented is in the Smithsonian.) “But I’ve never found anything to equal the tone of glass.”

The wood table on which his 50 glasses sit is made specially to reflect sound. As he dips his fingers into two small water bowls--”It took me a long time to learn how wet to keep my fingers; clarinetists don’t dip!”--and launches into “Greensleeves,” several people who had been watching juggler Pearson join the crowd. They seem different here, more peaceful, as if picking up the personality of the performer.

The two performers are almost a complete contrast. Pearson is raw energy. He bounces humor off his audience as easily as he might bounce a ball off a wall.

Turner is more mature, dark-haired, soft-spoken, dressed in a blue shirt and a navy-and-red striped tie. He has one of those craggily attractive faces that crinkle when they smile.

Once, in 18th-Century Britain, he tells his audience, there were a lot of people who played glasses. Mozart wrote music for them. So did Haydn. Ben Franklin was so charmed by the glass players he heard in England that he invented a mechanical version.

“Now the skills have about vanished. There are probably less than a dozen of us in the world who play Mozart and Haydn on any kind of glass instrument.”

Gypsy Life

Turner has a home in Philadelphia, but he and his wife are rarely in it. They have been leading a cheerfully gypsy-like existence exploring Southern California between his performances. He plans to play in Balboa Park today.

“Did you teach yourself to play glasses?” a young sailor in the crowd asks him.

“Oh, yes .” Turner’s shoulders move in an explanatory shrug. Who would there have been to teach him? “I started nine years ago, with eight glasses arranged so I could play chords. Then I just kept adding and experimenting.”

Now his range is more than 3 1/2 octaves. It takes him, on this early-summer Sunday, through the bagpipe tune of “Scotland the Brave,” through “Chariots of Fire” and “Scarborough Fair” and “Whistlin’ Rufus,” a ragtime number he used to play on the streets of New Orleans. As the last notes die away, the purple of a child’s T-shirt is reflected, magnified, through the quivering water in the largest brandy glass.

“In New Orleans, I used to play under a magnolia tree on Royal Street,” Turner tells the crowd. “Whenever it rained the thickness of the magnolia leaves would hold water for a while, but at a certain point it dripped through.” If the water level in the glasses is altered even slightly, he said, so is the music. “If it’s raining I never know what to expect. I tell people I’m playing avant-garde classical!”

Humid weather, he says, is wonderful for a glass player. Extremely hot weather, the kind he encountered in San Diego in April, is not.

“I tune as I go along.” He gestures at several bottles of distilled water sitting on the grass beside him. “It’s the only instrument I know that evaporates.”

Turner has been playing outdoors for seven years. It has added an element of adventure to his life that he cherishes. He thinks it keeps him healthy.

“That, and playing in the fresh air. Musicians don’t usually get much fresh air.”

Recently, while doing research for a recording he is planning, he discovered that the mad scene from the opera “Lucia di Lammermoor” had originally been written for glass.

“But they couldn’t find a glass player in Naples. So it was rewritten for flutes.”

With a little detective work in the New York library, Turner unearthed the original score of “Lucia di Lammermoor.” The part written for glass had been crossed out, but he was able to decipher and copy it.

“I played it for Beverly Sills on ‘Live from Lincoln Center,’ ” he said. “I don’t think it had ever been played before. It was thrilling.”

About a two-minute stroll from Turner’s sheltering trees, across from the Hall of Champions, a different sound is filtering into the warm air: the squeak of rubber balloons being twisted.

Zu Zu the Balloon Lady, dressed in her baggy, daisy-splashed, yellow clown costume, sits under an umbrella twisting a delicate swan from a long pearl-colored balloon.

“I can make 130 different animals, but most days I end up being asked for the same 15 over and over,” she said cheerfully. “Mostly it’s butterflies and poodles.”

Her tinsel-tangled wooly wig glows scarlet in the afternoon sunlight. So does the blob on the end of her nose. A crowd of waiting, watching children surges in, jostling against her knees, forming an uneven line across the walkway.

“We’ve been looking all over the park for you,” a woman tells her.

Another woman pushes a small boy in drooping blue shorts forward, and hisses “Go on, Eric. It’s your turn next.”

Zu Zu is a professional clown, a member of the World Clown Assn. She is also a ventriloquist, a puppeteer, a magician. (And a woman with good lungs. She blows up all her balloons herself.)

A Long Wait

In order to get a good spot in the park, she explains as her fingers deftly mold a long gray balloon into the “He-man sword” Eric has requested, she has been here since 3 a.m.

“We sign in for our spot at 7 a.m., but the actual permits are not given out ‘till 11 a.m.,” she said. “A lot of the street performers go back home in the interim. But I live too far--Jamul--and my car is a real gas-guzzler. I usually spend those four hours practicing new balloon animals.”

What, under the baggy costume, the stark white makeup, is the real Zu Zu like? She could be any age. Any size. Her voice sounds young. Her hands, the only part of her not covered, have freckles.

She chuckles if you ask her what she is really like, and shakes her head. “It’s better left a mystery. It’s my clown mystique.”

A girl about 8, clutching a Cabbage Patch doll, tugs at Zu Zu’s billowing sleeve. Can she, the child wants to know, have balloon sunglasses?

Zu Zu blinks. “Are they for you? For the doll?”

They are, it turns out, for the doll. Its name is Roberta. “This is going to be interesting,” Zu Zu murmurs as she fishes a bright pink balloon from one of her voluminous pockets. “I’ve never made sunglasses for a Cabbage Patch doll.” She hums as she works. Her mouth is painted into a perpetual smile.

Sixty seconds later Roberta is carried away, most of her flat doll’s face obliterated by pink balloon glasses.

Zu Zu has been a regular street performer at Balboa Park for four years. In between she performs at promotions, children’s parties, charity events--”any place I can get a booking.”

She was a student at San Diego State University and thinking about becoming a psychiatrist, when, in 1982, she took the university’s course in clownology.

“Right from the first I loved being a clown,” she said. Bits of bright rubber from balloons that have popped litter the grass around her chair. A brass urn at her elbow is labeled “Donations.”

“When you put on your clown costume, you put on another personality with it. It’s OK to be as silly as you feel like being,” Zu Zu said.

She does dislike the 40 minutes she has to spend painting on her “trademark” face. Another disadvantage, Zu Zu says, is that sometimes small children do not realize that she is real. “They rush up and thump me, as if I was a cartoon character, or a pillow!”

“Is that your natural hair?” a man who is passing stops to ask.

“My, no. I had to drink lots of tomato juice to get it like this,” Zu Zu tells him. The children at the front of the line giggle.

“Most of the time this is a lovely job,” she said. “Since I’ve been coming to the park, I think I must have spoken to people from just about every country in the world.”

At first glance they seem very different--the juggler, the musician and the balloon lady-clown.

But they do have things in common besides being street performers in Balboa Park. All three have a sense of adventure, a sense of humor and goals.

Zu Zu wants to learn how to eat fire.

“I have a friend who is a fire-eater,” she said. “He’s going to teach me.”

Pearson, the flamboyant juggler, wants to become an actor.

And Turner? When you ask him what his major goal is, he smiles his crinkly smile and says, “The recording I’m working on. I’m calling it ‘Jamey Turner’s Ode to Joy.’ ”