[Trav S.D., “Tall Tales (and Counterfeit Codices)”, Dixon Place, NYC, 2/22/10]

He had me at “smithy,” one of several words so archaic there was no need for a free-associative filibuster of misspeech to turn them into automatic laugh lines. But Trav S.D. held me on every word like the medicine-show spellbinder he played in a brisk first set of flimflam from the front porch of an America so bygone even those who lived through it weren’t there.

Trav took us through tales of carnival freaks, two-fisted lawmen and the shellgame of the New York public school system, tripping on point over every term, conjugated into a multiverse of illuminating malapropism. Thinking spherically and snowballing sideshow nonsense with modern-day senselessness (in one memorable bit the traveling trickster tries to secure a grade-school artist’s residency for his flea-bitten trained monkeys and dog-biting men), Trav showed that the classic con-man is as undying an American type as the stuff we need escapism for.

Flailing his points home like a charismatic receiving divine bulletins or a prophet undergoing a series of lucid strokes, Trav channeled the likes of P.T. Barnum, who fleeced urban bumpkins in the fringe theatre of his time not far from where Trav was plying his trade.

Halfway in, he ditched some of the folksy drag for an adventure into the self-imagined sophistication of those same urban bumpkins, with a satire of spy-thriller literature that extended the genre’s over-exposition into intricate descriptions of its own arbitrary coincidences and ethical failings.

Some jokes you could see coming like the meteor you’re dying to watch whack the earth at a summer multiplex; most left you hysterically wondering at the license number of the truck that just hit you so you could get it to back up over you again. In these United States there’s always another one coming — but get on the road, because there sure ain’t a Trav S.D. born every minute.

[http://travsd.wordpress.com; www.dixonplace.org]