LITTLE DANCER

Generally, when I busk, I just play and play. I mostly stop only if someone asks a question that cannot be answered by either charades or the flip book I have displayed. One night, as 2 young ladies were sitting and listening, my eyes kept wandering to my side where another much smaller visitor was doing a very, very slow dance, like a Tai Chi master reaching the extreme possible edge between steady concentrated deceleration of action and complete cessation of motion. It was hard to focus fully on this little guy as his dance was happening at the very edge of my visual panorama. I could only turn my head so far, as my face was attached to the didj in front of me. The 2 young ladies sitting in front of me were giving increasing attention to the tiny dancer at my side. As his mesmerizing movements drifted almost imperceptably closer to me, he increasingly became the focus of the young girls' attention. An interesting display from my perspective, as I watched the girls' attention to my side become mixed with a twinge of concern. That seemed a bit curious to me, but I kept exploring the rhythm I was riding. A few moments later, the young ladies failed to hold back the look of surprise on their faces as our dancing friend leaped onto my leg. This caught me off guard to be sure, but I didn't break the drone. He wasn't hurting me. He weighed next to nothing. He was barely more than a stick figure.

As the unease in the young ladies' faces subsided, the fascination in this interaction between dancer and musician grew anew. But now there was an increased intensity in the air as fascination mixed with caution. Would there be any more sudden unrestrained actions erupting from this captivating small-bodied dancer? He certainly had his audience enthralled with alert focus on his every move, including me. The sense of caution affected my playing. Once our dancer abruptly decided to use my leg as a stage, it didn't take long for me to transition from a fast rhythm to a slowly undulating drone, my eyes straining in my head to reach the best viewing angle while not breaking my face's connection to the didj's mouthpiece.

The caution proved reasonable as, without warning, and with the same abrupt explosion of movement exerted to land on my leg, he jumped off my lower limb, landing quietly in front of my tip contraption. The sudden movement did cause me to wince mildly, creating a strange aural bump in the meditative drone. Immediately following that reaction, my eyes strained even harder to keep the visual connection to our unusual and unpredictable dancer, as he was now at the far extreme right edge of my visual field.

Now I was completely enthralled. What will he do now? Is there meaning to his movements? Can I keep him in my sight without interrupting the music? Can I move the didj while playing without knocking the young ladies in the head with the bell of my didj? I decided to stay in place and keep playing, putting the burden on my eyeballs to do acrobatic feats in the quest for uninterrupted viewing of this sometimes fluid and sometimes erratic dancer.

I don't have a tip jar or hat. Instead, I have 2 four-inch PVC tubes that stand a little over 3 feet high. This tip contraption eliminates the burden of protecting any received tips from theft or wind. It allows me to really got lost in my playing. I never really look at it while playing. Now, however, our little dancer was actually climbing up it's PVC walls! My playing was set on auto-pilot as all my energy was focused on watching this spectacle at my side. I did build the tip contraption to be fairly sturdy, but I didn't design it to be be a climbing wall. It is PVC pipe after all- round, slick, no real place to grab hold and climb. That didn't seem to matter. This little guy was doing it. Not only that, he did so while maintaining the same slow fluid majestic kinetics he demonstrated prior to his jumping outbursts. Once he reached the top of the tube, he did an almost ritualistic dance, extending one arm in the most excrutiatingly slow fashion. Then the other arm would reach out just as slowly, as if embracing the space just above the entrance to my tip contraption. This dance was so slow, focused and entrancing, it seemed hard to believe it did not have meaning and purpose. He seemed to be somehow stirring some unknown or yet to be understood metaphysical energy, focusing it at the very entrance to my tip tubes.

This strange little fellow had me so captivated by his hypnotic performance, that I lost my sense of caution. When he suddenly jumped onto my shoulder, I abruptly stopped playing. After a few moments, the young ladies picked him up from my shoulder and held him for some time before he flew away.

Question, does anyone know of any meaning attributed to visits by a praying mantis?