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Santa Cruz festival celebrates the beauty that street musicians give to the downtown community

by Sherry Conable
T
he first annual showcase of street musicians in Santa Cruz will take place on Sunday, June 13, from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. at Laurel Park, 301 Center Street, in Santa Cruz.   Dubbed   STREET   WISE SANTA CRUZ, the show includes fantastic music, beautiful ceremonies, inspired street theater, great food, a righteous raffle, and some community drumming. This event is sponsored by Housing Options (HO!), an advocacy group that seeks creative, alternative shelter options for folks living outside of traditional buildings.
I decided to produce this show in a moment of what felt like divine guidance. After being in kind of a personal funk last winter, I started spending a lot of time downtown listening to music, and I was really blown away by the quality of the folks performing this year — they are truly exceptional! The street musicians gave me a much needed rebirth, and I wanted to figure out a way for more people to have the chance to hear them, and to celebrate the beauty of what they give to the downtown community in Santa Cruz.
Issues surrounding "appropriate activities" in the downtown area in Santa Cruz have been hotly contested over the past few years. Because Santa Cruz was the epicenter of the Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1989, the devastation of the city was very intense, particularly in the commercial core. In the rebuilding effort that has taken place, there has been a consistent theme of greater and greater limitation of the lives of folks who are perceived as "less desirable" - the "homeless," the visibly poor, "hippies," teenagers, and others.

This has been carried out primarily through the use of the Downtown Ordinances, a set of particularly repressive laws passed in 1994 that targets the above groups; the ordinances have regularly been selectively enforced to discourage them from being in the downtown area. For instance, no dogs are allowed downtown, but well-to-do tourists walking purebred dogs are rarely confronted, while young folks living in a more tribal way, with their mutts, are regularly ticketed.
The City made an effort to stop street music and other performers altogether. But under the leadership of Tom Noddy of Bubble Magic, the performers organized, came up with a plan, and took their case before the Santa Cruz City Council. With a lot of community support behind them, they won the council over!
The agreements include that folks will play for just one hour in any given place
and then move on to another, and that if a complaint is called in, the performer will stop for awhile. Complaints are rare, and the delight of folks downtown in hearing the musicians is easy to see. Lots of smiles, and some spontaneous hip swaying and foot stomping, are often seen among those who stop to listen.
More than half of the folks who will be performing are "homeless," while the others are not. And though, in order to participate in the show, the performers have to be playing regularly on the streets, all of them play in other venues and have other gigs as well — the street is just one of the places where they choose to share their gifts and talent. Some of the artists also have albums available to purchase.
Folks play on the streets for many reasons: They like the feel and the ambience;