Firing Up the Studio…

Once again last night I was back in the office getting ready for some virtual shows. Everyone thought virtual magic shows would go away once in person shows started up again, however they are still here.

One thing I don’t like about how I do my shows is that it’s not very mobile. What I mean by that is that it wouldn’t be easy to travel with my current virtual show and set up if I wanted to do one while I was on the road.

That should be something that I work on, essentially a “briefcase show” but for virtual. The trick part shouldn’t be a problem, it’s the lights and stands that will be tricky to figure out how to pack small and light.

-Louie

The Artist’s Way – Completed!

I’ve now finished the 12 weeks of the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. This book was suggested to me by a performer friend over the summer. The book is laid out by week and while it’s a bit “hippie” for me, I stuck through it and I’m glad I did.

Let me start by saying, that I don’t think I’m this book’s target demographic. A lot of it feels like it’s trying to get people to step away from negative people who say you can’t do art for a job. I did that years ago, however it did encourage me to deal less with negative people and I’m a happier person because of that!

Did the book make me more creative?

Sort of. It’s given me some tools to get my ideas out a little bit faster, and while I play a lot, it’s encouraged me to play a lot more…and write a lot more.

I think anyone who commits to the book will get something out of it.

-Louie

The Moisture Festival Podcast – Part 2 Tom Noddy

This episode is part 2 of our two part conversation with the maestro of bubbles Tom Noddy. If you have not heard the first part, go back and check out the beginning of our conversation.

tom noddy

In part #2 we pick up right where we left off with some amazing stories from Tom’s 50 plus years of performing. If you love vaudeville, you are going to love one of the people who is responsible for keeping it alive. A great conversation with a truly amazing performer!

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Mish Mash Wallet

A few weeks ago I ordered a custom designed wallet that had playing cards on it (you can read about my card wallet here). I had totally forgotten about it, until it arrived yesterday. It was a fun surprise!

Here’s the wallet:

This wallet is essentially Harry Anderson’s MishMash card design, but set up like John Kennedy’s Mind Power Deck! I’m happy with how it turned out, however if I was going to make another one, there are a few small changes. Right now it’s a way to force one of 8 cards, then a fishing procedure to know the card.

I’ve got an idea to then have the card appear in your wallet, with no sleight of hand! I’m going to play with this idea later this week!

-Louie

Catch a Show…

As I’ve gotten older and deeper into my career, I’m learning to take more days off…more days when I could be earning a lot of money. A friend of mine who is a magician invited me to his company’s Christmas party and there was a magician there. It was James Donahue, who I know from the social media, and I’ve made a prop for him in the past, but never met in person.

James Donahue - magician

It was great to see him work for actual people.

Something I always say is that if you want to really work an industry you need to be a consumer of that industry. What I mean by that is it really helps if you can see what your show looks like form the attendee’s perspective.

Every now and then, taking a night off and seeing someone else do what you would normally be paid to do is a great chance to learn a lot!

-Louie

Some Documentation…

Back at the end of October I had won some of Al Koran‘s ashes from the Ken Klosterman auction that Potter and Potter did. About a month ago they arrived,. I got a display, a sealed deck of Al Koran cards and a vial with some of his ashes.

al Koran's ashes

Recently I got a shipping notice from Potter and Potter and I had to wait a few days for the mysterious package to arrive. It was documentation from Ted Lesley about him giving Ken some of the ashes and a little bit about the story behind it!

This letter wasn’t part of auction’s listing, but it was very cool of Potter and Potter to send it to me when the letter turned up!

-Louie

Working on a Briefcase Show…

A while ago I started thinking about putting together a “briefcase magic show”. This would be a show that would fit in a briefcase and have minimal set up and take down. Ideally there wouldn’t be much more set up than simply opening the case.

You can read my previous post about it here.

The end goal would have this show as a totally different show from my normal show, so there is no duplication between the two shows. Right now the set list I’ve written for it is:

  • Ruler prediction
  • Choices Card Trick*
  • Ball of Yarn*
  • Lotto Prediction
  • Spoon/Fork/Knife*
  • Game Show
  • Birdcage

The things with the asterisk after them are tricks that are also in my current main show. That means I need to figure out how to either move them out of the main show, or out of the briefcase show. It’s a fairly mentalism heavy show, with 4 predictions (if you count the card trick as a prediction).

I think I might need to add another magic trick to it…not sure what. I guess that means it’s time to get to work on that.

-Louie

Fun Pics….

I’m always on the look out for fun photo ops when I do my show. One of the things I do is the shell game, and whenever I see police officers, I always try to get them to play it.

With everyone now having a camera in their pocket, it’s super easy to get these pics. You just need to be alert and looking for opportunities. Right now is a good time to get pics of you doing tricks for Santa or elves.

When you start looking for photo ops, you’ll see them everywhere.

-Louie

Virtual KAX 2022

I’m excited to be a presenter at the 2022 KAX conference! KAX is for family performers and is geared towards all sorts of variety acts: magic, juggling, puppetry, storytelling, etc

This will be my second year as a speaker at KAX. Last year I did a talk about shadowgraphy. This year I’m going to be doing a talk that I’ve wanted to do for the fair industry, and that’s on how to improve your show.

The talk will cover how to watch your show, how to write notes for your show, and how to implement those notes. I honestly don’t think a lot of people know how to actively work on their show. It’s work, and it’s not fun work, but the payoff is huge and can yield results very quickly!

I was looking at the schedule and there’s a ton of great speakers! You can get more info and register at: https://www.kidabra.org

-Louie

Tooth Fairy Magic…

tooth fair magic trick

The other day I had a strange idea. I wanted to do a transposition between a tooth and a quarter. Using the toothfairy as presentation hook is a no brainer for this. The challenge was that I wanted one of them to be held in the spectator’s hand and obviously they are very different shapes.

The solution finally hit me, why not hand them a folding coin that was folded in thirds? This will have roughly the same shape as a tooth, and have some textures like a tooth. Once that was figured out, the rest of the mechanics were pretty simple. Here’s me trying it out:

It works! This was a great solution for strange problem.

– Louie