Tough Acts to Follow Street performing loses its allure after a day of mangled puppets and chain saws.

Writing, you know, is not the most stable of professions. What you need is a backup. Something to do if the ol’ inkwell runs dry. Something creative. Something versatile.

Like street performance.

Why not? It’s a centuries-old tradition, one of the few forms of entertainment not remotely threatened by the Internet. So when you see that Universal CityWalk’s street performers are holding instructional sessions called “Tricks of the Trade,” you make sure to be there.

First stop: the Puppet Guy. (You notice pretty quickly that most people in the biz have a not-so-creative street name, undoubtedly thrust upon them by passers-by who say, “Hey look! It’s the Puppet Guy!”)

The Puppet Guy’s real name is Lee Zimmerman, and he tells you right off that he only got into street performing because he was so broke in art school that he couldn’t afford supplies. He dug out a marionette of Jimi Hendrix he’d made when he was 14, went out onto the streets of Philadelphia, and started racking up spare change.

His puppets have skeletons of 18-gauge wire covered with papier-mache (he uses newspaper and wallpaper paste). Each takes a week to build. He paints them as celebrity caricatures and designs them to parody the person’s movement in a specific way. Elvis is jointed at the top and bottom of his pelvis. Hendrix’s hand slides up and down the neck of his guitar.

Zimmerman hands you a Madonna marionette that when flipped over turns into Dennis Rodman. You hold it steady, jerk the string, and voila . . . Madonna’s skirt gets caught on Rodman’s arm. You’re left holding a media-hogging hydra.

The 6-year-olds gathering around you, however, don’t appreciate the postmodern humor of this glitch.

Next, Zimmerman hands you the Tina Turner marionette that just minutes ago he had crawling the stage, slapping the floor, draping herself over speakers to “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” You balance the handles and try to use your touch-typing-trained fingers to replicate the subtle motions that give Tina her trademark strut.

Your Tina moves like she’s trying to goose-step and tiptoe at the same time. You spend 10 minutes trying to kick a mini feather boa off the stage with no success.

Still, the children watch. It’s not your skill--or lack of it--that’s so riveting; it’s Zimmerman’s puppets. This suspicion is confirmed when two parents, obviously pitying you, clap as you step down.

No one offers you a nickel for your efforts.

You shuffle over to the center court, where David Cousin, a recent addition to the CityWalk cadre, is offering a little insight into juggling.

The best learning tools? Tennis balls laden with buckshot. (He cuts a small hole in the seam, adds a few ounces, then seals it up with shoe glue.) Properly weighted, the balls don’t go bouncing out of control when you drop them.

Having read, “Juggling for the Absolute Klutz” as a teen, you have a leg up here. You can keep three of these altered balls going for, hey, at least 45 seconds. (OK, maybe 30.) This isn’t enough for today’s juggling-savvy crowd, though. No, they want machetes, bowling balls, chain saws.

Cousin, who’s been tossing things around since he was a kid, does seven balls at once, which is akin to juggling a small solar system.

This is going to take a lot of practice, clearly. And it is not without hazards (machetes? chain saws?). Cousin actually got a hernia trying to juggle a 9-year-old at a Boy Scout banquet.

Your last hope is the sarcastic escape artist Mat Cooper standing nearby, waiting to do his routine. He looks at you with some suspicion. If you tell everyone that this is easy, he says, you’ll ruin his career.

OK. For the record, it’s not easy.

Cooper straps you into this canvas contraption and offers one true trade secret: hold on to your elbows. You squirm and strain, struggle and sweat. You get one arm free and then, with a little coaching, start unfastening the ties.

The best part is that unlike juggling or puppetry, this isn’t supposed to look effortless. You want it to look hard. So when, breathless and red-faced, you wriggle the last bit of the jacket over your head, you think, yeah, I could be The Straitjacket Lady.

But straitjackets alone do not an escape artist make, Cooper warns you. The audience wants more and more: chains, water chambers, suspension devices. Cooper escapes from 30 pounds of chains--while wearing a straitjacket, for example. The stunt requires slipping his shoulder out of its socket. Ouch.

You decide then and there not to quit your day job.

“If you’re going to be an escape artist, you’ve got to threaten your life in some way,” Cooper tells you, “or they feel like they haven’t gotten their money’s worth.”

BE THERE

Universal CityWalk will again offer “Tricks of the Trade” from 5-10 p.m. Wednesday and Sept. 3. Call (818) 622-4455.