25/11/99

Perky, quirky Perkins

    He's all mouth. Mouth and lips and lungs. When he gets the chance, David Perkins can talk up a hurricane, but he's usually blowin' on something.
    He's the Pied Piper, Cap'n Outrageous and the "Balloon Ambassador" all rolled up into one wild red-haired, red-bearded, Bible-quoting, politics-agitating freak, and if you live in Jerusalem, by now you're saying "Yeah, I've seen that guy."
    The most unexpected thing Perkins says about himself is, "Aw, sometimes I'm actually low-key." There are no eyewitnesses.
    Adults sometimes can't figure what to make of him, but kids have no problem: when he suddenly appears on the street and starts twisting balloons into animal shapes, or tootles a flute while making funny faces, children gather 'round without stopping to wonder about his politics.
    "Kids are starved for entertainment. I walked through Hebron, blowing the shofar and giving out balloons to Arab kids," then did the same on the Jewish side.
    He is, in fact, overtly political. He campaigned loudly for the downfall of the Rabin government "after they sent out cops with billy clubs to beat up pregnant women and teenagers in the streets." Yet he once played onstage behind Rabin. He has been hired by both peacenik and settler movements, identifies with the far Right yet performs in Ramallah. He's ardently religious-nationalist, but has entertained the troops in Jordan.
    Nothing revs him like planting a flag for Judaism in unlikely places. "Applied Zionism" he calls it.
    "I was asked to perform with a group going to Korea on Yom Ha'atzmaut. I opened the festivities, in front of 3,000 Koreans and another 40 million TV viewers in Southeast Asia, playing the shofar and wearing tallis and tefillin."
    He turned heads in Venice, leading 75 Jews in a sort of klezmer serenade; conquered the Vatican, of all places, by blasting a shofar from its roof; and nearly got arrested at the Coliseum: "I did a spontaneous klezmer concert, got an ovation, and walked out just as the security guards were coming in. Rome is one of the few places where there's a sign of a trumpet and a circle with a line through it -- you can't play horns at the national monuments. Dunno why, they got this 'NO TRUMPET PLAYING'!"
    He led a march of shofar-blowers around Jerusalem's Old City walls, if for no other reason than because it's politically audacious. He's like that.
    In all those places, in Russia, Ukraine, the US, Thailand, England, there are people shaking their heads and saying "Did you see that Jew come through here?"
    Besides playing a mean balloon, he blows a dizzying variety of flutes, pipes, trumpets, the clarinet, sax and shofar. He favors the long, twisty Yemenite-style shofar plucked off African kudu antelopes.
    "Y'ever hear 'Jerusalem of Gold' played on the shofar?" No! "Hell yeah! I also play the blues on the shofar. I played at a museum once, for very rich people. I blasted a shofar louder than anyone thought possible. Then with two shofars simultaneously, blew 'em away. Then I added a trumpet, all three at the same time, playing different harmonies.
    "Some day I want to get 100 people and 100 shofars together and play a shofar symphony."
    You'll see Perkins at fancy dos, or on the pedestrian mall copping coins ("probably done more than 5,000 hours of street performance by now"), at fairs and festivals, political rallies, even a Christian wedding.
    And he'll materialize when least expected, most needed. After the bus bombings in Jerusalem, "I got on buses and did balloons to break the tension. I had to be careful not to pop them! People were jumpy."
    He'll be waiting in a long line at the bank and whip out a flute for an impromptu performance. In Seattle, he came upon a fellow tapping on a drum. "I went over with my flute, and before you know it there's hundreds of people, boogeying, dancing, I'm playing Jewish wedding tunes and people are rock'n'roll freakin' out, it was great! That's normal for me."
    You don't suppose Perkins could wait out an airport stopover without doing something about it. No way. "I was in Kennedy Airport, and the plane was three, four hours late. It was Christmas Eve, 300 people sitting around waiting. Well, I had kids juggling bags of peanuts, balloons all over, I had sword fights goin' on, and dancing, I was playin' a flute." He guffaws. "They bumped me up to first class!"
    He takes his shenanigans underwater too. Like the time he juggled on a unicycle submerged. "Seems easy, right? It takes a minute for the things to come back down. Yeah, but I had clubs filled with air. You let go, and they shoot up; you gotta keep dragging them down. It's the exact opposite of normal juggling."

RAISED IN Los Angeles, Perkins, 44, is undeniably offbeat. He relishes tweaking the Establishment (he once presented a police chief with a balloon teddy bear that featured an oversized penis), flaunts conventional behavior, and behind the proverbial clown's smile, he wrestles with inner demons.
    "Yeah, I was depressed for a while. It's normal for high-energy entertainers to have mood swings." Here's where Perkins descends into a discordant dark side. "But it was worsened by mind control and abusive spiritual imposition. I foolishly permitted myself to get involved with a mind-control, hierarchical cult yeshiva here in town. Diaspora Yeshiva. Did a goddam good job of destroying me, sucking soul powers out through here, and through here, manipulating, running my soul so I would start glowing and being high and holy and susceptible and then just SSHHLLLLUUUUPPP, sucking it off and having other people helping with it. Who knows what they were doing to my soul floating around, I dunno, exchanging it with a guy with asthma sitting next to me..."
    He is now sputtering with rage, betraying his hap-hap-happy persona. He had been speaking rapid-fire throughout the interview, exclamatory and animated, constantly interspersing scriptural quotes. But now, he ups the voltage even higher, the words spilling out so fast they're tumbling over each other. It's impossible to make sense of it, if you're not inhabiting that particular crevice of his soul.
    After a long, rambling diatribe, he asks if he should go into more detail, I say perhaps not, and he chuckles. He's a lark again.
    Perkins likes to loosen up adults with his antics, but at heart he's pure kid stuff. "In Russia, I taught children how to make musical instruments, how to make balloon animals, and juggle. I teach kids to play the shofar -- it's easy, actually. I show 'em this great trick, watch this --" he inflates a long, thin balloon with a mighty puff, ties it closed and pokes a finger in one end. The balloon rockets through his apartment, out the window and clear across the street. 
    Kids of his own? Alas, no. "I'm not married. I'd like to be married. I don't know why I'm not, I even asked somebody a couple of weeks ago. Apparently, my courting sucks." He laughs mock-bashfully. "Hey, I even put ads in the Post, looking for a wife.
    "Funny, I was running all those anti-Rabin ads, then I ran a front page ad saying I was looking to get married. After 35 ads to bring down the government, people said, 'Hey, I remember that ad you ran!' They all remember the one for the wife."
    Maybe he's not all mouth after all. There's a lot of heart, and a big, round face with rib-tickling expressions remote-controled by his outsized funnybone, phenomenal lung muscles, a deep well of bile for the evildoers, a tongue he sticks out lewdly at convention, and no one can play the sax without a brimming soul. With all that, he has sent uncountable numbers of children home happy, but he'd like to bring home a few of his own too.