I purchased a mobile home in the 1980's and for several years operated a mobile food dispensing business - The Taco Truck. You couldn't obtain a license for food dispensing back then- so eventually as my business grew so did the official handouts. I worked the corner of Madison and Franklin streets, Mon - Fri, 11am - 2pm for five years selling tacos burritos hot dogs chili dogs taco dogs hot dogs wrapped in corn or flour tortillas. In the late afternoons I worked County Hospital catching the shift changes at 3pm. Sunday mornings I hustled round Maxwell Street offering coffee and Little Debbies to the vendors. Come summer, I'd work neighborhood fairs, ethnic fairs and county fairs in Illinois and Ohio. I followed a carnival around once, along the Ohio River Valley selling chili dogs to the carnys.
Come winter, I'd pack my possessions, my dog and head south usually to New Orleans and Fla.

But what i recall most about having created and filled this role, is a certain awareness I often had of the situation. How odd it felt while parked curbside on Madison street, to be separated from the public - by only a thin veneer of Fiberglass. The extraordinary contrast in the goings on, myself in the rear compartment slicing mounds of lettuce, tomatoes, watching pedestrians as I worked, or at least pedestrians from the knees down pound the pavement with the days business, this against mounds of pale green lettuce on a bright orange mat.
Interiors activities/ exteriors pursuits, with the world wrapped round both.
I often think that my experience as a vendor sparked the beginning of my interest in roles and interactive performances and of course in that thin degree of separation.
It was a gypsy life- to be sure. And the gas was cheap and so was the food. And life was really really good back then in the mid to late 1980s.
Now, I grew up on Madison street on the far west side of Chicago actually - and so I'm proud to say that so many years later a business I once started thrived on that great street. I was one of the first to operate a food truck in the city of Chicago and this too means a lot to me. I've written much on the subject in my book in progress " the End of the 2oth Century" One of these days I'm going to do a bit of editing and publish what I have written