Forever Blowing Bubbles

I am walking down the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica on a Saturday night when suddenly I see bubbles, the kind a kid would blow in his back yard.

They are floating into the darkness over crowds that flow like conflicting tides up and down the open-air mall.

I notice the bubbles because the man who has made them is shining a spotlight on them and they are reflecting the colors of the rainbow, bouncing through a mist that drifts along the ocean front.

There is a mystic quality to them as they soar up from the blush of illumination that lights the thoroughfare and into the edge of night above, glowing in the single beam of light that the bubble-maker is directing.

Suddenly, the largest bubble bursts, scattering soapy water overhead like tiny shards of crystal that dazzle momentarily and are gone.

“It’s like life,” my wife, Cinelli, says, watching them vanish. “Just when we think we have risen above the crowd, our bubble bursts.”

If so, then we must attribute a godlike quality to the bubble maker, who keeps creating life and spotlighting it for a few seconds before it pops in a spray of minutiae.

Sometimes he blows smoke into the bubbles, adding a distinguishing characteristic that makes their deaths even more noticeable.

I am tempted to ask why a grown man would stand on a corner and blow bubbles, but I guess I know why. To make money.

He simply offers a new wrinkle to street-selling. Like the song in “Gypsy,” you gotta have a gimmick if you wanna be a star. Other street performers play musical instruments or dress up like clowns and make doggie balloons. This guy blows bubbles.

I like street performers. Unlike other cities where they are hunted down like dogs, they are tolerated and enjoyed along the Promenade, working for the cash dropped into their hats or their violin cases.

Some of them are more ambitious than others, like the jazz band of saxophones, bass, clarinet and drums that weaves “How High the Moon” into the fabric of a starry night just north of Arizona Avenue.

Crowds gather instantly for that kind of talent, but leave to play in awkward solitude a young violinist down the street who needs about another hundred years of practice before he is ready for his debut at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

“His mother makes him do it,” a street guy named Boris tells me. He points to a woman sitting on the edge of an edifice in the center of the walkway. “She drags him down here every weekend. The poor guy looks like he’s being forced to sell hot coffee in hell.”

“Say something nice about him,” Cinelli says, feeling sorry for the kid, whose violin music is like chalk scraped across a blackboard.

“There hasn’t been a son like him since Oedipus,” I say.

“Well,” she says, “that’s an effort.”

Farther up the block she calls my attention to a performer whose act consists of wiggling out of a straitjacket. I remind her that an escape artist named Steve Baker once taught me how to free myself in five minutes flat.

She says, “If you’re ever committed to an asylum, at least they won’t be able to subdue you in one of those. They’ll have to knock you out with injections of vodka and vermouth.”

Thousands walk the Promenade on a Saturday night. Every multilevel parking structure in the vicinity is filled to capacity.

But there is surprisingly little trouble. Part of that is due to the presence of police officers on bicycles who pick their way through the crowds like salmon swimming upstream.

Dan Salerno is one of them. He says sometimes carloads of taggers move in, vandalize with graffiti and move out again, and sometimes there are fights among the dudes when the bars close, but rarely anything more serious.

The gangs haven’t moved in . . . yet. Not the way they did in Westwood, turning the boulevard from a walking street into a wary street. Salerno promises they aren’t going to do that to the Promenade.

Even the panhandlers are creative, Salerno says. One of them hung out where a popular street performer did his shtick. Just before the act was over, the panhandler went around collecting donations like he was part of it, then split. The performer got nothing.

Near Santa Monica Boulevard, a woman holds a sign that says, “Pregnant and homeless.” A middle-aged passerby stops and says, “There’s no need for anyone to be homeless in America.”

She looks at him and says, “There’s no need for anyone to be pregnant in America either, but it happens.”

Down the street, bubbles soar and burst against the night, and a band plays on.