New Orleans street performer Joslyn Brewster went viral with her transforming act, but will she need to shift gears to get back on track?

Written by ZACHARY HAYES

Joslyn Brewster was meandering through the gritty, bohemian St. Claude neighborhood of New Orleans with her friend Jason in the late spring of 2010 when she spotted a slick set of wheels collecting dust in a patchy suburban backyard - a black Power Wheels Cadillac Escalade. Brewster made a beeline for the home’s front door. The owner made her an offer: a cool $100 and she’d be cruising through the French Quarter at a lively five miles per hour top speed. Brewster gave the car another good once-over; it was missing a battery and the sun had worked up a good fade on the factory paint job, but after some savvy haggling, they were pushing the miniature plastic Caddy back down the sunbaked street, $65 lighter.

Back at home, the desecration began. The drivetrain, the seats, the interior bone structure, all excised, dismantled, and set aside for further defilement. The thin plastic husk that remained was sliced apart with surgical precision and reconstructed with a hefty assemblage of metal hinges. The frame from a hiking pack scavenged from a nearby dumpster would replace its skeleton, grafted onto its polyethylene innards with thick aluminum crossbars. Leg gear was hacked together using wooden planks wrapped in chopped-up couch cushions and black t-shirts, and janky casters and dumpster belts traps were callously screwed into its flesh. The .26 horsepower drivetrain would be attached to the user’s forearm, its life-giving wires running down their sleeve to a transplanted 12-volt deep in the contraption’s body cavity. The finishing touches: a Walmart Transformers mask and a mini vanity plate fastened to the bumper inscribed“PLZ TIP.” Calloused and coated in sawdust, all Brewster had left to do was take her for a spin.

On July 2, 2010, Brewster carted her creation into the heart of the French Quarter with Jason - who’d built a similar apparatus - and they both set to work donning their second skins. Within minutes, a throng of revelers had gathered around a curious sight: two small cars rambling shakily around a plastic tip bucket. They began to lift and expand, and the two of them stood to reveal themselves as a motley pair of makeshift Transformers. “I couldn’t work for more than 15 minutes at a time in that original costume,” says Brewster. “The leg gear hurt so bad.” Despite the ample breaks and wobbly performances, they made $150 in an hour and a half, and Bourbon Street got the first taste of its newest street spectacle: the NOLAtron.

While Jason merely dabbled in the act, Brewster committed full throttle to her new persona, shifting her into a higher gear in the New Orleans performance art scene and beyond. Videos of her would amass millions of views on YouTube and Reddit, leading to lucrative deals with fairs and conferences around the country. And a blockbuster cameo in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows cemented her in the busker canon, a patron saint to the vibrant and the free. “It’s one of the most lucrative street acts I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of street acts,” says Doug Conn, a professional magician and Brewster’s former roommate.

But for her, the road to success was far from smooth, pockmarked instead with the potholes and flats endemic to the world of street performing. Such a grueling act pushes the body and mind beyond their reasonable limits, and it raises a daunting question: just how long can it possibly go on?

When I spoke with Brewster in Savannah, Georgia’s sprawling Forsyth Park, she oozed with pop-punk panache. Ripped skinnies revealed flashes of hot pink tights underneath, and her strikingly red hair fell just beyond the striped shoulders of her Aaahh!!! Real Monsters tee with the verve of a stage-rattled Hayley Williams. “With almost every aspect of performance,” she says from behind the pearlescent pink lenses of her cat-eared sunglasses, “there's what's called building the edge.” The fundamental goal of a street performer, she explains, is to get someone to stop and look. Without fail, others will follow suit. “That’s what made this act so interesting,” Brewster says. “It immediately inspired you to stop and look and pull out your phone to record because you’ve never seen something like this.”

At 37, Brewster is the embodiment of the introverted artist’s dream, managing to transcend the bush league trappings of her medium with a purely organic following. She does not market herself, has never maintained a vast social media presence, and has never produced her own video content, leaving the work of building her iconic brand to the eager spectators itching to snap a picture. She is a veteran of the “cool by association” industry, and she has plenty of style to spare. But the way Brewster tells it, she wasn’t always so keen on the spotlight.

“I kept to myself a lot as a kid,” Brewster says of her childhood growing up in Indianapolis, Indiana. “I read a lot of books, spent a lot of time skateboarding, rollerblading, biking. My desire was extreme sports.” She was good for her age, better than most, but she never managed to take it to the next level. “I was too nervous to compete, too shy,” she says. “I just always thought ‘I’m never good enough.’”

When Brewster turned 18, she dropped out of high school, got her own place, and worked a few dead-end jobs to make ends meet. She found her first taste of live performance in the local mall where she spent most of her time playing Dance Dance Revolution, often on a full head of acid. Here, she fell in with a few people who introduced her to the late Indianapolis rave scene, an underground spectacle still pulsing along with one foot out the door.

In fog-laden warehouses and rented-out VFW bars, where legions of lasers and heady drum and bass tracks fought for ravers’ drug-addled attention, Brewster found more than a community; she found a stage. “I used to do a lot of what’s called ‘liquid,’” says Brewster. “It’s like a dance with a lot of complex motions and glow sticks in between the hands.” From here, she fell into the art of poi spinning, a flow art using a weight on the end of a flexible cord, which often either glows or, as Brewster performed it, is on fire.

While she thrived on the highs of performance, over time she grew depressed and detached from the scene, and she yearned for a fresh start. Eventually, she found one in a friend of a friend who had an apartment down in Louisiana. At 21, Brewster quit her job as a bar manager, bought a bus ticket to New Orleans with her last paycheck, and set off for the South. “I had no plan,” she says. “I literally moved down there with a Tootsie Roll container filled with change.”

Brewster moved in with this new friend only to discover that it was not an apartment at all. “They were paying somebody to stay in a squat, which is just an abandoned place,” she says. “So, there was electricity and running water, but it was technically not legal to live in. There was a bunch of people living in this house, and the entire block was scheduled for demolition.” They’d be kicked out two weeks later. This was 2007, nearly two years after Katrina, and large portions of New Orleans remained a gutted-out wasteland, prime real estate for the homeless and destitute. She got a job at a beignet place but lost it soon enough, taking to selling hemp jewelry on the side of the road and squatting wherever she and her friends could find a free space. “I was not up for any of this,” Brewster says. “I just randomly chose this lifestyle and figured it out.” She’d spend the next two years hitchhiking and working odd jobs with a girlfriend, bouncing between New Orleans and Indianapolis with increasing frequency. Eventually, when that relationship fell through, Brewster found herself back in New Orleans, alone and rudderless once again.

She wound up sleeping on the floor of a street performer named Mike Gifford — AKA Magic Mike — whom she’d met a few years earlier, and he presented Brewster with a rare opportunity. Gifford was working on a new act at the time — an illusion involving a performer whose head would be dressed up like a dog and stuck through a table into a small pet crate resting on top — and asked if Brewster would want to give it a try. “I went out one night for an hour and made $75,” says Brewster. “Just barking at people.”

“Once she got a taste of that, she was like, ‘well, let's see what else we can do,’” says Gifford. “She caught the street performing bug.” Brewster took to performing the dog act eight hours a day for several months, making up to $700 a night, but she quickly got the itch for something new. “That act left me vulnerable, and the crowd can be very disrespectful to a street performer,” she says. “And that’s right about the time I came across the Transformer.”

Brewster had stumbled across the concept on a YouTube video from a filmmaker out in California named Drew Beaumier who’d created a similar suit. “I thought it was a really neat idea,” Brewster says. “But I thought it could be better.” At this point, she’d moved in with her friend Jason, and while he recreated Beaumier’s concept to a T, Brewster became detail-obsessed, tailoring the cuts and the internal structure of the suit to more fluidly switch from car to human when she stood. Still, it was far from perfect.

Brewster worked that first suit for a few grueling months before she had to take a break, but she returned to it in February 2011, anxious to get back to the act. She fixed the issues that were causing her so much pain, replacing the wood planks with catcher’s leg guards and the casters with rollerblade wheels. It was a major upgrade. “I made things much smoother,” says Brewster. “I never had to make many changes after that.” She’d spend the next 5 years — from 2011 to 2016 — working that suit nearly every day, figuring out the ins and outs of New Orleans street performing and making a name for herself in the French Quarter along the way. “She really was a character for the quarter,” says Gifford. “Everybody in New Orleans remembers the transformer.”

As her notoriety began to grow, so did her pocketbook. In early 2012, Brewster landed a $10,000 gig working 19 days at an annual traveling fair festival in Cleveland, OH, and she felt like the act was finally starting to take off. “A few months prior, I’d started seeing a counselor and started discussing transitioning,” says Brewster, a transgender woman. “And I decided that after that event, I was going to come out.”

Though she initially feared the worst, most people were supportive of her transition. “It was my mom who didn’t take it well at all,” Brewster says. “She freaked out and told everybody and didn't allow me the process that I wanted.” They wouldn’t speak again for at least six months. Even so, she knew she’d made the right choice. “It was a relief,” she says. “Then it was just the new norm. Nothing really changed. So, I just went back to work.”

Near the end of 2013, Brewster experienced her first taste of viral fame; a gif that showed her driving around her tip bucket made it to the front page of Reddit, elevating her persona beyond the local notoriety familiar to most street performers. “It was really weird,” Brewster says. “People would come to New Orleans to perform and they would already know me from videos they’d seen.” She decided to take the act on the road, planning to travel up to Ann Arbor, MI, to work for the summer. In a twist of fate, the very last person to tip her before she left was Andre Nemec, one of the writers behind 2014’s live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. “He took a video, handed me a business card and a $20 bill,” says Brewster. “And he said ‘this is going somewhere very important.’”

In Ann Arbor, Brewster ran into a reporter one day while working and he took a video of her that has since racked up nearly 10 million views on YouTube. A flurry of articles followed: CNET, Salon, TODAY. “It was so surreal to have offers coming left and right that I was just turning down,” says Brewster. “I just don’t like flying.”

Back in New Orleans later that year, she moved into a place in the French Quarter with longtime magician friend and mentor Doug Conn, and they relished the conveniences of living only a few blocks away from the best performance spots in town.“It was a pure life,” says Conn. “We performed, we talked about art, and we ate good food.”

Soon after, she got a surprise call from the team behind a sequel to TNMT. Nemec had sent that video of Brewster to Michael Bay, the movie’s executive producer, who saw her act as the perfect easter egg to include in the new film. They wrote her in, and in May 2015, she was on a plane to Manhattan — she made an exception for the Turtles — where she spent five days shooting a vibrant, cacophonous street festival scene. “I flew first class, had a limo, free drinks on the plane,” says Brewster. “I’m like ‘I should not be in first class. I have $13 to my name.”

By the time the movie finally came out in 2016, though, the tides of fate had taken a violent turn. While working a conference gig for Vitamin Shoppe in Florida, she overexerted herself, performing for 19 hours over two days and severely straining her back. In Michigan that summer, she picked up two totes of books while helping a friend move and heard two loud pops from her back, slipped discs that sent her crumpling to the floor. Not long after, her leg gave out on the stairs one day, her tailbone slamming into the brick corners. “And that pretty much did me in,” Brewster says. “I didn’t think I’d walk ever again.”

She moved back to Indianapolis, falling into a deep depression as she limped from couch to couch. Brewster never saw a doctor for her injuries, leaving her to struggle through the lengthy, painful recovery all on her own. With her mental health dangerously spiraling, she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for observation, hoping for any shred of relief from her ballooning well of struggles. After a brief stay, the hospital staff offered her a bus ticket back to New Orleans, and, unable to afford the steep costs of inpatient care, she accepted, leaving behind her NOLAtron suit in the process. Once there, Brewster tried to get back on her feet, working a side gig at a po boy shop while trying out a few new illusions that never really took off. “Everything I built, I lost it all,” she says. “So, I decided I wanted to start performing again.”

She made a deal with a friend from Michigan: He would pick her up and take her back to Indianapolis where she’d have a month to rebuild the NOLAtron suit before he came to collect her again. But as soon as she started rebuilding, a severe gout attack spread through her tendons and completely locked up her knee for months. Between the gout, her injuries, and her ever-shifting housing situation, she wouldn’t end up performing the act in New Orleans again until February 2020. “I went out and worked and got about five weeks in,” says Brewster. “Then Covid shut everything down.”

She spent six months out of work, and once she was forced to return to performing in August, there wasn’t nearly enough money to survive on.

December 30th, 2020, would be the last time the NOLATron graced the streets of New Orleans. “I didn’t even bother with New Year's,” says Brewster. “It just felt like it was over.” She sold everything — her suit, her computer, her tools — and moved to Savannah, GA, where she’s been working kitchen jobs ever since, all the while hoping to rebuild the suit and get back to performing.

“These things come and go in life,” says Gifford, who has blown through a number of acts throughout his career. “But can you imagine a million people saying you're the most awesome thing ever, and then you can’t do it anymore?” When Brewster speaks of rebuilding her act now, there is an air of distant reverence, like an accomplished actress trying to reinvigorate her career, but she also doesn’t like looking too far ahead. Still, she knows she will return to the art of street performance one day. For her, the freedom of that life — of being your own boss and having the agency to create and entertain — is more fulfilling than any steady paycheck. “I receive much more appreciation for what I do when I’m performing,” says Brewster. “When you work for someone else, it becomes expected. All that appreciation goes away.”

Both Conn and Gifford spoke at length about the esoteric nature of street performance; there is no book, no concrete guidelines to follow, and rarely will you find a mentor to show you the way. Most people simply have to figure it out as they go. But Brewster is a professional to the core, with a keen eye for what makes an act tick. She could hold her own with any of the old-world masters, the mime troupers and the grands artistes de cirque alike. And like a true pro, she’s apt to dissect even the most modest performance with an air of humble expertise.

Near the end of our meeting in the park, a dusty man on a mud-caked bike skidded to a stop not five feet in front of where we sat and announced that he would be speaking. Most everyone else walked on, but with us, he’d found a captive audience. He gave a lengthy, prepared speech about his military history, the homeless camp he represented, and the various reasons he was seeking donations before abruptly falling silent, a sorely missed beat that left us wondering if he’d actually finished. After he’d rode off, Brewster took stock of his routine.

“He was technically building an edge, trying to gather people’s attention for what he’s doing, but it came across as a yes or no. You don’t want to give that option,” she says, drawing a half circle in the air. “You’re trying to feed on curiosity, you’re trying to get them to stay. And well, he had no finish.”