DO. NOT. ENGAGE.

DAMN.

I could kick myself for not getting a picture...but at the same time, I'd feel horrible about putting it up. He was, after all, clearly homeless and either severely mentally disturbed or tripping his rancid balls off...

When I see psychotic homeless people, I tend to go into survival-mode: steering a clear path around them, sweating, avoiding eye contact, willing them to look elsewhere and not notice me walk past. This stems, not from a distaste for the down-and-out, but from harrowing brushes with dillusional derelicts in the past.

There was one instance of a homeless man in the 42nd Street subway station spitting on my shoes then chasing me down the subway platform, screaming obscenities, because of his completely random conviction that I had littered in front of him. I was shell-shocked. At the impressionable young age of 6, I would pick up scraps of trash along the road on my way home from the bus stop because I earnestly believed that, by doing so, I was single-handedly saving the planet. The thought of littering is barbaric to me, so my inner child wanted shout out in defiance of my accuser, but by the time we reached the end of the platform, he had begun ranting about conspiracy theories and I knew that defending my meek Midwestern white girl honor was useless. You simply can't argue with crazy. Thankfully he didn't throw me off the platform.

It was equally scary and embarrassing when a bag lady flipped-the-fuck-out on me when I offered to buy her a ride on the subway. She had been beseeching passing commuters to open the emergency exit door for her so she could wheel her junk into the subway station. Everyone was ignoring her, so I felt bad and offered to swipe her in. I didn't want her to get herself or anyone else in trouble for walking in through the exit. "Can I swipe you in?" barely escaped my lips before she lunged for me screaming, "SHUT THE FUCK UP! WHOOOORE! GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME! AHHHHH! GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME!" Red-faced, I did as she said and got the fuck away from her, dodging through a crowd of curious onlookers.
By the time another homeless man (and looking back, it may have very well been the same dude who spit on my shoes years before) accosted me on the platform, taunting me with racial and sexual slurs, I had learned my lesson: DO. NOT. ENGAGE. Instead, I stayed put, kept my eyes averted, and did not make any sudden movements. I was able to duck into a train last-second after enduring a barrage of menacing threats and him closing the distance between us from 15 feet to 5 over the course of 10 minutes.

So when I walked out the office last Friday and saw a very dirty tall white male donning a child-sized wedding dress, fairy wings, years of scum in a chest-length beard, and wide vacant eyes that complemented his "schnozz-berries taste like schnozz-berries" pantomimes, I knew exactly what I was looking at...

...but the crowd, 50-Midwesterners-deep, that encircled him apparently thought he was off-Broadway entertainment. As I walked a wide arc around his "performance," I couldn't help but let out a hearty laugh when a few people in the naive audience began to clap.

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SHOOT. I can't find him in any Picasa or Flicker accounts, either! You'd think one of the tourists would have posted that magic...

UPDATE: Thanks to a fellow redditor, here's a video the guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFVbh5WvITM&feature=related
Just to clarify: I'm not trying to make light of a very serious problem like mental illness/ homelessness; just commenting on how bizarre and mildly humorous it can be to see it in action. Wow.