Remember when the silver guy showed up on Kalakaua Avenue a number of years back? The whole pop/lock, Fab Five Freddy spray-painted tux jacket act was weird and different and cool.

These days, there are a number of silver guys on Kalakaua every night, plus gold guy, bronze guy, aluminum guy and glue-some-glitter-on-his-face guy. The sidewalk is one after another after another of fortune tellers, dancers, macramé-necklace sellers and panhandlers.

They each stake out their pitch on the sidewalk on the mauka side of the street. They're there every night in the stretch between the Royal Hawaiian Center and the Moana Surfrider.

Some of the performers are pretty good, like the a cappella men's choir singing church hymns. Some are pretty bad, like the scrawny guy singing '90s rock songs on a tinny karaoke machine.

Some of the street action more than pushes the limit of municipal tolerance and regulation. One guy has created his own sidewalk massage studio, complete with waiting-room chairs.

There's a grown man in a matted Elmo suit with a money bucket decorated with Elmo's face. He doesn't sing or dance, but the tourists love to shove their kids in his direction and pay to snap a photo. The metallic guys must be so irritated.

Just outside the front door of Macy's, a guy has set out an extensive display of his spray-paint oceanscapes on the sidewalk. He has lights shining on the pictures like they do in the fancy Wyland gallery across the street, but his are hooked up to car batteries, the cords snaking along his square footage of the sidewalk. A stinky-sweet cloud of paint fumes wafts around him.

And something you hardly ever see: two young women dancing hula — clearly trained in somebody's halau — with a collection bucket next to their CD player.

The street-vendor action has grown to the point where it makes the International Marketplace look controlled and upscale.

Free speech and free expression? Sure. Some of them. Free rent? Oh yeah. All of them.

The tourists seem to love it. They're strolling around putting dollars in buckets, posing to get their portraits drawn in charcoal and taking photos and video of everybody. There are four pages of Waikiki Street performer video clips on YouTube, most of them submitted by tourists who write about how cool this dancer or that singer or that silver man was.

But it does bring up the questions of how much is too much and where to draw the line. Right now, there doesn't seem to be any line at all.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.