By Danielle Capalbo
The first time Mike Perlman was arrested, he sang Nirvana to the officers from the back seat of their squad car while riding to the station.
“Come as you are,” he crooned, and wished the police shared his sense of acceptance. Instead, they had cuffed him and his two friends where they found them: on a street behind the Boston Public Library. The young men weren’t doing anything wrong, Perlman said – they were only dancing.
They had been dancing in the streets for three months. In neon green T-shirts and with supersonic stage names, they were 123 Party!, a renegade dance troupe and local comedy phenomenon Perlman co-founded in 2006.
For nearly two years, the three-man group turned up unexpectedly in gaudy get-ups – neon T-shirts, short black shorts, knee high socks and black headbands – to bust moves like the “Buttshake” or the “The Lightning Bolt Ambush,” where each dancer extends his arm toward the crowd as though shooting a lightning bolt from his fingertips.
“Sometimes, we like to charge it a little and then shoot it out,” Perlman said.
But these days, it’s a one-man show.
“We’ve switched members like Spinal Tap,” Perlman said.
After two line-up changes in less than two years, he said, the troupe disbanded last summer. Only Perlman was left.
“If I could do it right now – call two random guys who knew the moves and had the uniforms, who I knew could do it, and I could get to know them – I would,” he said. “It really makes you feel like you’re alive.”
The sooner he has a troupe, the sooner the 24-year-old can dance again. So, he’s holding auditions – he just needs 50 Boston men to confirm using myspace.com/123_party their interest and level of commitment. Then, he said, he will post a time, date and location for try-outs.
For anyone interested, Perlman had listed his requirements for applicants on the troupe’s checkered neon green and black Myspace page. The first sounds medieval: “Male, 21-28,” but Perlman said throwing a woman in the mix would undermine its silliness.
“It would become a sexual thing,” he said.
Other requirements are exceeding funniness, a fearless wit, availability some nights and weekends in Boston and 127 years of one-on-one private dance lessons with Kevin Bacon.
The last is a stretch, he said. It’s far more important that someone be kind – “without a mean bone in their body” – well-rounded and fun, he said.
“Dancing is not that important. You can learn dancing,” he said. “But being able to relate to people, being funny, being a genuinely nice person … is the first criterion.”
And, he added, they’ve got to have comedy training – although 123 Party! is preposterous, Perlman is a serious performer. The recent Emerson College graduate majored in theater, and has extensive sketch comedy and acting experience.
“It’s very methodical. It’s very serious,” he said, and added the troupe must practice three to four nights a week, for a couple of hours.
The idea for 123 Party! emerged from a cold February night after staff at the Foggy Goggle ejected Perlman and his best friend, Bob Collum, for dancing around the restaurant and bar with their boxers worn on top of their pants. They wound up on the street in the cold.
For the next month, he said, he toyed with ideas for color combinations and costumes. The result was 123 Party!’s unmissable green get-up, and the original line-up was Blaze, Dice and Fury – Collum, his band-mate Mike Forst and Perlman, respectively.
They took to the streets immediately and were booking gigs within months: from birthday parties to a lavish soiree in a private mansion, from the newsroom of the Boston Globe to Times Square for Fuse’s “Pants-off Dance-off.”
“We hated it when people referred to us as ‘guerilla marketers,'” Perlman said. “We’re not. The reason we do it, go out there, is because we love it.”
At the time of Perlman’s arrest in early 2007, 123 Party! was in its second incarnation.
Several months before, Collum and Forst left the troupe to concentrate on their band, “Honest Thomas.” At Perlman’s request, the Avalon hosted 123Party! auditions in December.
“Three people showed up,” Perlman said. “I took two of them.”
The newcomers called themselves Sonic and Turbo, and about three months later, they were arrested with Perlman in broad daylight at a photo shoot for Boston Magazine, said Perlman.
The arrest catalyzed the second reformation of 123 Party!
“Turbo couldn’t take it,” he said. “It was too hot in the kitchen, he had to take his apron off.”
A dancer called Ultra took Turbo’s place, Sonic changed his name to Tank, Fury took the name Lazer and the three danced through the summer. Eventually, Perlman said, he and Tank clashed horns irreconcilably, and though Ultra was a perfect fit for the troupe, he moved in September to Western Massachusetts.
Now, Perlman is the last man standing, but not for lack of trying. And while finding an eager cast isn’t easy in the city, he said, he hopes at least two people will shelve their inhibitions and give the troupe a shot. That’s the whole point, anyway, he said.
“The theory behind the entire thing is: You live your life everyday. Most people are sucked into a routine. Most people are afraid to come out of their shell,” he said. “Us doing this puts people in a different state. It allows [them] to realize, ‘Wow. I can really put myself out there. I can really go out there and dance.”
