— a guest article written by Fringe artist Andrew Potter —
The Road to High Street is the live, multi-media, musical, storytelling performance of my days as a guitar-playing, unicycle-riding, rubber chicken-juggling street performer with my longtime fire-eating friend, Wheeler Cole. We called our act The High Street Circus. Wheeler and I met in college and got our start with a mime act that Wheeler wrote and I set to music. We gradually added juggling and unicycle-riding, and then, one day, Wheeler learned how to eat fire.
We started doing shows at a children’s theater in Rhode Island and eventually began traveling around the state to do paid performances. It dawned on us one day that we could actually do this as a career. We knew that San Francisco was the place to go if one wanted to be a street performer, so right after graduation we moved out West to give it a try.
The street-performing scene in San Francisco was hot at the time. Tons of acts would perform in front of huge crowds. Hats were filling up with cash. After honing our show for a couple of years, our career took off. We won a street performing competition and were hired for a TV show. From there things only got better.
We had many more adventures in San Francisco but also began touring internationally, winning another competition in Milan, Italy and landing a three month tour in Japan.
Along the way, we met and worked with so many hilarious, crazy and inspired performers. I began to realize that we really were living a dream-come-true kind of life. I knew what we were doing was unusual among modern day careers, yet I also knew many successful performers who had chosen this route. After a couple of years in grad school, earning my MA in media production, I decided that our story – the story of two wanna-be street performers becoming an internationally-known, world travelling act – would become the subject of my next work.
The Road to High Street is a highly visual, musical storytelling version of our wondrous career that has garnered rave reviews from Fringe Festivals around the country. I include the stories of our living in a beer tank (our bizarre first home in San Francisco), the tale of our first successful juggling routine, and our adventures around the world. Mostly it is a story about what it means to live an unconventional life, explaining those choices to my father and coming to an understanding of why we make the choices we do and how we reconcile them with our family.
The Road to High Street has 5 performances beginning July 10th
Details and tickets
— Guest writer Andrew Potter is the creator and performer of The Road to High Street
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