Photo by Frank McMains
Statuesque: A living statue and the living he makes in New Orleans.
In a city where just getting up in the morning is debatably an act of performance art it can be hard to stand out in a crowd. The mimes, living statues, fortune tellers, street corner saints and bottle-cap tap dancers of New Orleans’ French Quarter do a passable job of cutting a notable figure in this most eclectic of American cities. They ply their unusual trade for the phalanxes of tourists that wander the better-known parts of the Crescent City, but they are part of a broader subculture that could only exist here in this humid, raucous and enthusiastically permissive place.
On the stifling August Saturday when I plunged into the press of international visitors, and locals dressed in their frilliest and most sanguine skirts for the annual Red Dress Run, Jackson Square did not lack for performance artists. I had called Mike, the Golden Football God, the Street Corner Saint, the day before. He had told me where he would be laying out his five-gallon painter’s bucket with the expectation of a steady stream of dollar bills as he contorted himself into odd, double-jointed postures and posed with passers-by.
The life of a living statue is both predictably peculiar and surprisingly humdrum. Mike approaches his gold-slathered profession as a typical nine-to-five gig, one that he has been at for a little over two decades. Rain or shine, heat or hurricanes, Mike sets to work with a dedication that would do any career-oriented person credit. The difference is that Mike’s choice of career mandates the use of enough golden body paint to clog the pores of the entire cast of Cirque du Soleil and, as was the case on this particular weekend, that he spend the entire previous night chasing the affections of a lady Lucky Dog vendor. Small wonder beer breaks are an occupational necessity.
The French Quarter, for all its off-season bead throwing, bone-rattling pop music and carefree decadence, cannot mask its origins in an old-world zeitgeist and the authenticity that seeps from the mortared walls like so much river water condensing out of Portland cement. Some cities will always wrestle with an identity crisis— whether it is the place that makes the people or the people who make the place. New Orleans labors under no such existential ponderings. It is a place where uniqueness is written in the scrollwork of the cast-iron fences and perfumed with the bracing pheromones of last night’s fun.
The city shapes the characters that inhabit it and in turn they carry New Orleans aloft in a half-maudlin parade that celebrates the idiosyncrasy of a place whose fate seems predetermined by the periodic pummeling of tide and storm. And so it goes on, pounding into the night, with a hand outstretched for a tip or a head tilted back to drain a bottle until the next big one blows in from the Gulf or some unknown calamity prompts the citizens of “the city care forgot” to take a respite from their revels. In the face of whatever the future holds for New Orleans, the mad actors and workaday Joes alike will adjust to an ever stranger and more precarious position on the geographic and cultural fringe of a country that has never known quite what to do with its unceasing mirth and its sullied, flaking glamor.
