I spent a week in York, and there’s a lot to report. Train rides are a great time to update the blog, so let’s get started.

Fortune Telling:

I did pretty well at fortune telling in York. And there were two venues that worked.

1) The Shambles. This is a super narrow bit of road, really a brick walkway, that is reputed to be the inspiration for the look and feel of the cinematic Diagon Alley. Because of that, there are FIVE Harry Potter themed shops within one pedestrian block. Setting up with the magician’s table got me a little commerce, but it really took off when I invested in a Ravenclaw scarf, and started telling people I was a “visiting professor of divination”.

2) Pubs and Anywhere Else I Tried to Eat. If you’ve never been in a UK pub, the atmosphere is a lot more social than in a restaurant/bar in the States. People are more comfortable interacting, and I got in the habit of always displaying my fortunetelling table sign when I went to eat. I could spend all afternoon on the street trying to get clients, and do better in an hour in a pub, so long as I didn’t care that my food was getting cold.

Taking the table to York was a good experiment, but I’ve decided I’m not going to haul it all over Europe. I’m going to stash it with the (infinitely patient) Hudsons as I blow through London. The table’s useful, but lighter is better.

Shows:

I had already restructured my shows a bit, based on my painful lessons in London, and the show was doing more or less okay outside the V&A. But I had hopes that York would be more congenial, as I saw a lot of people just wandering around looking at the sights, as opposed to people busily travelling from A to B. People were much more willing to stop and watch the whole show.

I’m threading the final trick through the entire show now. And we are always “just about to” perform it. That does seem to help quite a lot. The primary weakness of this show, at this point, is that it would absolutely never work for non-English speakers. I have made no progress on that, and indeed my solutions to make the show work at all relied heavily on speech. So I’ve a great deal more to learn before I have a working “international” show, and I don’t think that will happen this trip, but, baby steps.

Community:

In London and York, I’ve found other buskers to be quite friendly and helpful. I met a musician in York who was a great boon. Stephen Davies, who is a fun and engaging guitarist/singer, clued me in about York. He even tried to get me a pub gig. I had planned to give them the Mountebank Show, a 10-15 minute act designed to advertise the fortune telling, at a table in back of the pub. But the night manager, who was perfectly fine with letting me do a free show, was not okay with me telling fortunes and making money, going so far as to say he’s “not licensed” for that. Anyway, I walked. I later found that I could walk into a random pub as a customer and could be doing readings pretty quickly. And by the time management knows about it, all they see are happy patrons.

Moving Forward:

I have a street show that mostly works. It’s a big step forward from what I had when I arrived. Collecting a crowd? Still brutally hard. Keeping them once I’ve got them? Significantly easier. I have more to learn, but I’ve got enough check marks that I’m calling this a win. I’ve got that unlimited Eurail pass, and so I’m taking the show on the road. I’ll be traveling lighter, both in terms of luggage and the weight I give my goals. I want to see fun things, visit a few places, and try the show out on different cultures, so long as they still can follow English. So I’m gonna bop around a bit, zigzagging my way towards Prague, which is my final must-busk-there destination.