User:Ira Leviton/My sandbox

Disco Freddy, also called Larry the Unbelievable at the beginning of his public career, was perhaps the most notable character of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s on the Riegelmann Boardwalk extending from Brighton Beach to Coney Island, in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Routine
Disco Freddy was about 60 years of age during his heyday, and entertained crowds with his faux dance and comedy routine on the boardwalk during warm weather. His performances consisted of dancing to music played on a large portable battery powered transistor radio-tape recorder that he often held while he danced, interspersed with jokes about his background and Yiddish culture. According to his routine, he was from the "streets of Brownsville" in Brooklyn, and had performed in Manhattan but the people there didn’t understand his humor or appreciate him. His dance movements were less dancing and more like partial seizures, waving, complex tics, and windmill motions, which delighted many in the crowds that spontaneously assembled to watch him, while it confused others. During his acts he occasionally had unpredictable behavior, such as rushing to the edge of the crowd to scare old women or chase teenagers on bicycles. On the other hand, he often coaxed older women in the crowd to dance with him. He routinely drew hundreds of people to watch him and performed several times a day.

After several short dances, he usually announced that he was going to perform a very dangerous or death-defying act that had never been attempted previously. With several deliberate self-interruptions to build up the tension, he placed his jacket or a small used paper bag a short distance away on the wooden boards of the boardwalk, smoothed it out, cleared a large space in front of him, moved the crowd back a little, and finally donned a blindfold and jumped over the object, presenting the move as a remarkable achievement.

The reactions of the crowd ranged from laughing to mockery to incomprehension. He did not ask for or collect money for his performances. His act stopped some time in the mid-1980's, and his real name and current whereabouts are unknown.

A page on the French language Wikipedia that describes him is at http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disco_Freddy

In video

 * Disco Freddy appears appears at 45 seconds, 1 minute 26 seconds, and 4 minutes 36 seconds in the short film Brooklyn by the Sea, directed by Arnold Baskin in 1979.

In photos

 * An artistic photo of Disco Freddy, blindfolded and jumping over his jacket, taken by photographer Tony Segielski, is available [online http://www.segielskiphoto.com] on his official website (section '' WORK / OTHER IMAGES ')

In literature

 * In his novel Try Darkness, author James Scott Bell tells of a chance encounter with a curious character who called himself "Disco Freddy."