The Human Firecracker: Kids - don't try this at home, or on the stage of a nightclub

I'm always on the lookout for interesting and odd jobs and, while this one isn't exactly a job, it certainly qualifies as interesting and odd.

Last week, there was an article in The Wall Street Journal on one John Fletcher, who performs at country fairs as "Ghengis [sic] John the Human Firecracker."

Fletcher is a 47 year old former drug user and alcoholic who leads one of those strung-together lives that more and more people in the heartland seem to be resorting to. He works at a gas station, in a paint ball field, and as a bass-player in a band.

And to raise money for charity, he dons a protective suit, swaths himself in as many as 13,000 firecrackers, stands in the bucket of a raised hydraulic crane, and flicks his Bic to set himself off.

For performing this feat, he doesn't charge. Instead, he solicits donations for food banks. Fletcher has done this dozens of times over the last decade, and estimates that he's detonated about 300,000 firecrackers. Protective suit and all, he doesn't walk away from any detonation unscathed - he'll be covered with powder burns and bruises from the sheer force of so many firecrackers igniting.

This year, he's guessing that, between cash and food donation, he's responsible for about 1,000 meals provided by a local Food Bank.

There is, of course, something quite touching about this. Would that more folks had this level of concern about he plight of others. Mr. Fletcher is not exactly a capital H "have" himself, but here he is caring for the have nots.

But this does raise a few questions.

The first  - about what, beyond the milkiest of human kindness, motivates him -  is answered by Mr. Fletcher himself. While clean now for 17 years,

Mr. Fletcher says his affinity for pyrotechnics could be a new form of addiction. "I guess my firecracker suit is my drug, and it's a drug I can do that's going to help people," he says.

The second thought that came to mind is about the Rhode Island night club fire. So few years after 100 concert goers burnt, choked, or were trampled to death when a fifth-rate rock band set off fireworks that turned the place into a one-story inferno, doesn't just the notion of combining a not-so-great-rock-band with incendiary devices give people pause?

The real big question, of course, is why people would watch him to begin with. Here's what they see once he lights up:

A series of explosions rippled up his torso, and sparks ricocheted off his armor. Smoke obscured his face. After about 30 seconds, Mr. Fletcher had to relight one of the fuses to keep the explosions coming. Onlookers whistled and yelled as the pops shot down one leg, then the other and finally on his back. With the final pop, the crowd grew quiet. Mr. Fletcher leaned over the bucket's railing, pulling off the shredded remains of his suit as he descended and tossed them to the ground.

One person in the audience keeps coming back each year for the performance at the Fowlerville Family Fair:

"I've never seen anything like it. It makes me very tense and nervous," says Stacey Lundgren, 60, who was in the crowd. "He gets hurt every time, and he just keeps on doing it."

Much as I like fireworks, who'd want to watch someone set off thousands of firecrackers wrapped around his body, with the possible outcome that he'd immolate himself? And does anyone want their kids to see this spectacle?  (Of course, I've never been a circus aficionado or the freak show type. Side shows of all sorts depress me, although I will confess to enjoying piglets who race for Oreos at the Topsfield Fair.)

There may not be much to do in Fowlerville, Michigan - maybe the racing pigs don't go there - but this? I hope all those watchers and waiters at least have the decency to throw a couple of bucks or a package of Hamburger Helper into the collection bin.

I just can't shake the idea that the location of this story is not incidental, that this saga will be added to the growing volume of depressing, disheartening lore coming out of the [once] Great State of Michigan at a faster rate than Pontiacs used to roll off the GM assembly line.

Sky-high unemployment. Detroit a near ghost-town returning to nature. All those death knells for the blue-collar middle class.

Mr. Fletcher's past aside, it's hard not to think about him as a poster boy for men who once might have forged the sort of solid work life that auto workers once did. (His father, in fact, was an electrician at GM.) Now his livelihood is a no-future combo of pumping gas and handing out paintballs.

And I'm afraid there's a lot more of that where this came from.