Bubble Man

By Vince Basehart

July 11 -- When the Lens first gets wind of Santa Monica's "Bubble Man," he immediately conjures up images from an old made-for-television movie starring John Travolta. In it, a young Travolta plays a boy with a life threatening disease which requires he spend life inside a giant, hermetically sealed bubble.

I set out for the pier on a recent afternoon and gird myself to meet a man trapped behind plastic. Instead, I encounter Tim Dillenbeck, an entirely different kind of Bubble Man.

He is thus named for his life's work of making soap bubbles and sending them flitting across Santa Monica airspace. He's been doing it for twelve years.

Dillenbeck, about 60 years old, has the look of a Hell's Angel – big hair, big beard, big suntanned forearms – and the heart of a hippie.

We meet near the carousel, beneath a torrent of transparent, golf ball-sized bubbles issuing from one of his homemade bubble-making contraptions. A good many of the bubbles drift high and float a long way towards Ocean Boulevard.

"What I do is 100 percent about the people and making them happy. I know I've done my work when I get smiles and thank yous," he says.

Indeed, bubbles make people happy. His bubblers spew hundreds of the little critters at a time, and, wherever they roam, people are looking up, smiling, swatting at them.

One man ducks as one of the bubbles explodes atop his Dodgers cap. A young woman kicks one with her sandaled foot. A boy chomps madly at the little orbs drifting down around him until his mother pulls him away.

All of them are smiling.

"I don't do this for the money but I do take donations," Bubble Man says, pointing towards a little basket and a handwritten "thank you" sign resting on the deck.

His homemade bubble makers are ingenious devices, made out of scraps of electronics, the remnants of the Bubble Man's days as a sound engineer and roadie for '70s rock 'n' roll bands.

He has two operating today. They resemble old film reels atop microphone stands, each spinning under battery power to dip into a small trough filled with liquid soap, rotating in front of a fan and spewing bubbles like a Gatling gun.

Dillenbeck can also dip a wand into a tray of bubble sauce, wave it through the air to create watermelon-sized blobs that lumber through space for a few feet until breaking under their own, soapy weight.

After a few hours, the deck beneath his performance area can get slick.
He carries large plastic jugs of his own bubble liquid which keeps the bubble makers producing.

I ask him what the stuff is made of, and like a chef guarding the house recipe, gets coy, "It's a kind of dishwashing liquid I pick up, and a certain amount of water."

A little boy stands beneath a shower of bubbles and breaks them on his finger tips.

A dude in sunglasses and surf shorts walks by and calls out, "Bubble Man!" and throws Dillenbeck a peace sign.

There is not much of a profit model in spending one's days sending waves of beautiful, harmless, delicate orbs through the heavens, shimmering with a rainbow sheen, just for others' enjoyment. The Bubble Man makes you sort of glad there isn't.