nerdmeyr & K

That was the CNN headline for a short, unabashedly positive interview by TBS’s Eric Lanford for The Storyline about Baton Bob, who makes a routine (no pun intended) of going out into Atlanta’s streets and twirling his baton.Â

I kept waiting for the (straight, white) interviewer dude to make some comment to let all of us in TV-land know that while he was talking to Bob, he wasn’t really down with Bob. But that never happened, even during the scene where they were at Bob’s place, opening up his favorite costume closet (of course, this being a “straight” piece, there weren’t any jokes about items coming in or out of closets). When Bob pulled out his Superman outfit and said he wanted to make it sexier, so he cut the legs higher, not a blink. And then when Bob pulled out his Spideyman costume and said that the sanitation workers love it for some reason, Eric Langford just faced the camera and said something to the effect of, “An outfit all of us want, but only some of us can actually wear.”

There was some innuendo about Bob being femme gay (e.g., a veiled reference to how crazy it was that he was allowed to be a featured male twirler in high school), but that’s about as far as it went. I love Baton Bob, and I pretty much love the interview, which was all about how Bob battles depression by getting out into the streets and doing his do. Bob talked about how he likes to give an uplift to the people “who work in cubicles”; as someone who watched this via my cubicle, I can attest to the fact that it is uplifting, even when its not live. The camera only showed the positive passers-by, the ones who are into him and love what he does, but I’m OK with this. The machination of filming and airing via a mainstream news outlet gives this sort of street action a dignity and an importance that should be recognized, especially by the kind of trogolodyte who might give Bob a hard time. After doing a bit of reading about Bob, I learned that he lost his airline steward job after 9/11, and moved to ATL from St. Louis, where it sounds like maybe the citizenry were not always so appreciative of him.

A lot of urban planning lately seems to give focus to building condos, making city downtowns warrens of high-density housing and 24-7 activity…. but not a lot of attention to what makes cities actually pleasant and great to be in, which, IMHO, is people. Lots of people in semi-anonymous space can bring out the characters like Baton Bob. It makes me think of when I was hanging out at the Belmont Inn or the Triple Nickel in Portland (oh, around 2000 or so), and, for awhile, there was this dude who would come into the bars wearing a black bodysuit, a hooded cape, and a black eyemask, carrying a large sketching pad and a pencil. He’d sit at the bar by himself, wouldn’t talk to anyone, wouldn’t drink or eat anything, but would spend hours making sketches of people hanging out and then give the drawings to them (hence his moniker, “The Belmont Sketcher”). Awesome, awesome. I love being in a place that makes space for the potentialities of randomness, especially when it involves costumery. It is something that I definitely miss living in small town Indiana.

Thanks to rcornelius.livejournal.com for the pic.