One thing I was working on over the weekend at the fair was freezing and holding for applause and for the effect to sink in longer. This can be hard to do, just standing still and waiting for the audience to do something.
I need to be better about this at the end of the effect and after telling a joke. Letting the effect or punchline marinade with the audience for a little bit. I’ve noticed the difference between the first day of this fair and the last day in the amount of applause and laughs I’m getting.
Doing this can be hard if you have a dead crowd, as you’re standing and waiting for very little audience response. One thing I’ve notice is that it builds throughout the show.
Whenever I’m performing at a venue and there are other shows or performers I always try to watch them. You can learn soo much from watching other acts. One of the shows that I saw recently was the Jet Pack Circus.
This show used the water jets to propel performers in the air. Their set up looked great and the show has great curb appeal. What I mean by that is that it looks like something you would want to watch, or would want to book.
I personally wasn’t the the biggest fan of the content of the show. Yes, the jet packs are interesting for about 5 minutes. After you see the first person go up, it’s all a variation on them going into the air. For example the first performer goes with the jet pack shooting from a board they are standing on (see above pic), then the second performer went up in a seated position (see pic below).
Once they were in the air then went around in circles in pool. It was pretty repetitive. The show was short, at about 20 minutes and around the 18 min mark they finally gave us something new when a performer did a flip.
Their ending was a performing went up holding an American Flag. It wasn’t a big patriotic production like how Ringling used to end their circus. There was no patriotic music, just someone holding the flag and waving.
One thing I remember from an old magic book was they was to get a good round of applause at the end of the show is to end with the production of a flag. That’s essentially what they did. I think this is lazy, they didn’t have a finale, so they waved a flag. I dislike it when any performer leans on the flag to try to get applause.
Honestly, for my taste it was a lot of “Look at these jet packs we bought” and less of a “Jet Pack Circus“. This show would have been better as an act within a larger water show, not as a stand alone show.
I also understand that these water jet packs are fairly new technology and performers are trying to figure out how to use them. I hope they come up with something cool!
One of the tricks that I came up with during the pandemic was a gag card that used the Out To Lunch principle. The gag relies on the similarity of the words “pitcher” and “picture”. You offer someone a “free pitcher/picture of beer”.
The card shows a full pitcher of beer, and you write their name on it. Then the pitcher magically becomes empty.
I’ve been doing this trick since shows started opening back up and about a month ago, I was doing it at the Abbott’s Magic Get Together. It was a hit with magicians, and many asked if I was selling it and at the time I wasn’t.
Recently, I’ve been doing it a lot and am convinced that it’s an amazing trick to non-magicians. I think the gag is very strong and that strengthens the magic trick as it’s unexpected. I’m trying to decide whether to write up the trick for a magazine, or to do make up sets and sell them. I think if I sell the sets, more people will do it as it’s easier to get a set of the cards than having to make you own set from scratch.
Everyone things performing on the road is all fun and games. My current run is about 15 weeks long, sure there are some gaps in the schedule that I fly home, but 15 weeks is a long time on the road.
There are some things that I do to keep myself sane, like going for walks or to the gym. This particular trip I’m driving, so I was able to take some tools with me. Last night was a big night, I hunted down about 50 bottles for my Evaporation trick and then made them in my hotel room!
Later today I’ll be working on a couple of custom props in the hotel room after a full day of shows at the fair! The glamour of working on the road ever ends!
The virtual magic show that I did a couple days ago went well. It had been a while since I had done them, so the show wasn’t as tight as it could be. Also I didn’t really have time to run the show a few times, so I had forgotten a few bits. Overall it was a decent show.
With the COVID delta variant out there, I think there’s going to be a lot more people looking for virtual shows than there were a few months ago. I just booked another virtual show that will take place in October. I’m flying home for this show to do it from my virtual studio.
One of the things that initially was cool about virtual shows was that in theory you could do them from anywhere in the world for an audience anywhere in the world. The reality is that many hotels don’t have good internet, and the room isn’t necessarily a good background. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done, but it’s an additional challenge. You may need to book a room at a nicer hotel, or book a conference room. Sometimes those costs can make it cheaper to just fly home and do the gig.
What I need to do is put together a virtual show that can be done with basically just my laptop camera (or small webcam). All of the props would need to be hand held near my face, with no action taking place on the table. This would then work for most situations and could easily be packed.
Right now I’m performing in Coeur d’Alene Idaho, and about 20 minutes away is Spokane, Washington. Spokane has a magic club and I know most of the people there. I swung by an did a mini lecture with Adam The Great and Cecil Lewis. We talked about working the fair circuit and taught some tricks.
This is a three phase routine where the silk goes through a coat hanger. Each time the penetration is a little bit different. The first two phased are pretty standard silk and ring moves, but the third is a move that’s unique to using a coat hanger.
This was fun to finally teach! I’m glad I’ve now put it out there into the world. Honestly, I’m not sure how many people will ever do it, as it’s a pain to do and the reel is expensive!
At the fair I was performing and at the end of the show I looked down and my giant spoon had broken in two pieces!
The spoon act was something that I had taken out of my show a while ago, but started doing for a gig this summer. It’s been in the show all summer since!
I do have more spoons at home, the issue is that the spoon is big and heavy. My car won’t be home until November, so if I want to grab another one, I’ll have to fly with it. Luckily, my friend Elliott Hunter understands metal and gave me some advice to try to get it through the summer. The simple crutch is some JW Weld and hopefully that will hold.
I’m going to have to be careful with it, but with a bit of luck, I won’t have try to fly with one of these!
Before I headed out on the road, I was cleaning up and noticed a book that been kicking around my office forever. I’m not sure how I ended up with the book, but I’ve never read it, so I threw it in my car. The book is Class Act: The Magic of Tony Binarelli.
When I was a teenager I think I had seen Tony Binarelli lecture at the Desert Magic Seminar in Las Vegas. At that time he was lecturing on mentalism from his book My Way to Mentalism. Honestly, I don’t remember much of lecture, but I picked up a set of the lecture notes for a friend of mine.
Ok, back to the Class Act book. There’s a lot of hype in the introduction of the book about innovative moves. The first two card sleights are a top palm and second deal, both of which I think predate Tony. However it’s also entirely possible that they are his.
The top palm is a two handed top palm and it’s not very good as written. It’s something that I was doing as a teenager because I couldn’t quite do the one handed top palm. Essentially, it’s a two handed, one handed top palm. In my version I slightly slid the top card forward with the deck held in mechanics grip. Then my other hand pressed down on the outjogged part and the card pops into your palm. In Tony’s version, he slides a lot of the cards forward, it looks strange. The one advantage to Tony’s that they don’t really mention, but kinda hint at is that it makes it easier to palm off multiple cards. You pinkie count them with your ring finger as you push down and they pop up.
The second deal is a turn over deal, you can’t deal face down from a face down pack. I was just chatting with Chris Beason about this second deal technique a few weeks ago. It looks good, but not a natural looking deal.
So far, I’m glad I’m reading the book instead of getting rid of it without reading it.
One thing I hate when performing is forgetting or mispronouncing an act’s name if I have to introduce them. Recently a show I was performing on had an performer whose stage name wasn’t the name I knew them by, and the stage name was unusual.
To make it easy, I put a cheat sheet on my table:
You’ll notice the name is spelled out phonetically. That helps me read it at a glance. It really makes a difference, rather than seeing how they spell it and trying to figure it out.
This week I’m performing on a stage inside a tent. It’s a nice tent and it solves a lot of outdoor performing problems, it gives the audience shade and cuts down on wind.
The first couple of days of the week I was performing at the front edge of the stage. The shows were doing alright, but I realized I was losing people on the side bleachers. It was a consistent loss of people from specific positions in the audience, so it was something that probably wasn’t my show. To try to fix this I watched another performer’s show from one of those positions and figured out why I was losing them.
You’ll notice there are two poles at the front of the stage and when I was playing too far forward, they people couldn’t see the show. Then there was a smaller problem that when playing too far forward it was hard for some people to see my face as they were almost behind me.
The solution was simple, I just moved my show two steps backwards. Once I did that the change in the show was dramatic! I kept the audience in the spots where I was losing them AND the side were more enthusiastic about the show!
