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What Motivates Solo Women Street Performers?
In 1992 (pre-google days), I spent 3 months in college doing individual study/research on the historical documentation of women street performers. Not only was there nothing on women street performers in library archives, sans a tale or two of women troubadours from long ago, but there was a serious lack of documentation of street performer (or "busker") history altogether. The lifestyles of street performers are romanticized or shamed, but the fact remains: there is a mystique around street performance since so few know who we are, why we became street performers, and why we keep doing it. Solo women street performers are especially mysterious to the mainstream, as we break gender stereotypes. I have started getting firsthand interviews with all the street performers I have known in my 25+ year career as a busker, so that more documentation will exist for students in the future. This article evolved from interviews with two infamous women street performers that I have shared venues with over the decades.

I recently interviewed Tash Wesp, aka Mildred Hodittle, about how she became a solo woman busker. She had been performing since 1981, and joined the Pickle Family Circus in the mid-80's, pursuing her desire to be a clown. When she developed a female European clown act that the circus did not place in its lineup, she felt the street was where she "had to go." She began solo busking in 1988. I asked about her first solo busking experiences. She said she decided to go have a good time clowning on the street in Berkeley, to talk to people, and use volunteers from the audience for her act, which seemed to work. She said other street performers helped her a bit, they would not let her starve, but they were also not giving her any good spots to busk on either. She said it was dog eat dog back then. She said it was always the European buskers that she met on the street that taught her good female lines and good female heckler comeback lines. She said she would talk for hours with European female buskers about what did and did not work for female buskers on streets. Read more in my new book, 21st Century Essays on Street Performing aka Busking, on Kindle!

21st Century Essays on Street Performing aka Busking consists of first-person essays and interviews with contemporary street performers, aka "buskers." Book includes the following chapters: 1) Busker First Times, 2) How to Interact with Buskers, 3) Women Street Performers and Sexual Safety, 4) Using Buildings and Awnings as Microphones, 5) Take Back Your Entertainment, 6) Tips Street Performers Remember, 7) How to Pick a Street Performer Spot, 8) Selling Out as a Street Performer, 9) What Motivates Women Buskers, 10) I Wish Everyone Passed the Hat for Their Pay, 11) Free Speech Costs Money at Seattle’s Pike Place Market, 12) Street Performer Family Tree. If you do not own a Kindle, you can download the same technology that Kindle uses for free to your PC and read Kindle books on your computer, iPhone, etc. instead. I have also published other books on Amazon - just Google "Kirsten Anderberg Amazon" and they should all come up!

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