By FERN SHEN
Scott Shane, a tough-minded reporter for The New York Times, would know a scam if he saw one and as he stood there Saturday at Baltimore’s 32nd St. Farmers Market, you could see him weighing the Tom Sawyer-esque proposition before him:

A smoothie salesman had rigged up blenders to bicycles so that buyers could hop on the bikes, pump the pedals, spin the blades, pulverize the ice with fruit and, basically, blend their own drink.

Shane eyed the intense-pink strawberry-basil smoothies and muttered “Five bucks?” But he couldn’t take his eyes off the fuzzy, brown hobbyhorse-bicycle, whose pedals spun a blender topped with a jiggling dashboard hula girl. His wife, Francie Weeks, was also mesmerized.

“We’ve got to try this,” Weeks said and pretty soon, Francie and then Scott were up on the blender bronco, grinning their heads off, whirling up a smoothie that took less than a minute of pedaling.

Smoothie-making leads to hula-girl-shaking.

The only problem with their first bike-blending experience was that the pedals were hard to turn. Turns out, the two better-functioning bikes at “Wheely Good Smoothies” had been worn out by the throng of people that had been mobbing artist/entrepreneur Natan Lawson on his first day at the market.

Shoppers of all ages had been clambering onto his mosaic-covered bikes or simply regarding them, with mouths agape. One of Baltimore’s best-known chefs asked Lawson whether he “does parties.” And other marketgoers were pulling out cameras and iPhones, speculating on whether Lawson had copyrighted the idea.

Right gimmick at the right time
“You’re going to kill with this thing you know,” enthused Spike Gjerde, the chef/owner of the Woodberry Kitchen restaurant in Hampden, after pedaling himself a strawberry-basil “wheely-good.”

Lawson has, in fact, not copyrighted the bike-powered blender concept, which he picked up at a farmer’s market in Vermont (and which can be found floating around on the Internet.) Keeping the idea to himself, he observed, in a phone interview, doesn’t seem to be in the spirit of things.

“I mean, I saw it at a farmer’s market, that’s how I heard about it,” said the 21-year-old artist and 2006 Baltimore School for the Arts graduate, who lives near the market and plans to sell smoothies there all summer. Still, Lawson would like to be, for a while at least, “the Baltimore bike-blender smoothie guy,” he said. “I sense I have the market cornered.”

It’s a small market perhaps, but Lawson thinks he can make money with the product. (He sold 200 smoothies at $5 each on Saturday and isn’t sure how much he clerared after expenses.)

How a blender-bike would look if Gaudi had made one
A painter, mosaic artist and bike enthusiast, Lawson says he mainly wants people to enjoy the experience of his creations, that happy moment when funky form meets frappy function: “I want these bikes to be seen, I want people to see these things in action.”

Indeed, brightly-painted and covered with beads, tiles and mirror-glass, Lawson’s blender-bikes would be right at home a few miles away at Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum. Lawson will, literally, go to great lengths to show them off.

He rode one of the bikes from Vermont to Baltimore last summer, for example, an especially impressive feat considering how much it weighs (“39 pounds … I got tendonitis”) and how much painstaking work he puts into each one. There were the hours of assemblage using frames and other spare parts at Baltimore’s bike collective, Velocipede Bike Project. Then there were the hours spent getting tiny shards of glass to stick to epoxy resin on a small curved surface.

The actual interface between the bikes and the blenders is formed by special parts he bought at $250 each from “people in California who make them,” Lawson said. They worked well – until they didn’t. After a few hours of continuous use they started to drag and stick so Lawson will be spending this week making adjustments. The blender-cycles are positioned on those stands used to turn road bikes into stationary exercise bikes. (About half his customers opted to have Lawson and his staff do the pedaling.)

So, they’re useful and cool-looking. But do people also like them because they’re good for the environment, because pedaling instead of plugging in a blender means you’re putting that much less greenhouse gas in the air, etc., etc? Lawson’s answer: yes and no.

“I’m not going to call them ‘green smoothies,’” he said. “When I think of the trips I made to Home Depot to get the stuff to make them…..” He does plan to stick to locally-grown, sustainably-farmed ingredients and get recycled cups, that sort of thing.

But mainly, he said, he’s hoping to open peoples’ eyes to the potential of a simple two-wheeled device that you power yourself.

“I want people to see what great things you can do with a bicycle.”