Using Time Wisely!

When I’m out performing at fairs in the summer, I can have a lot of down time in between shows. I try to be productive during those times. Last week I bought a ton of clocks and spent some time between shows gimmicking them!

magic trick with clocks

I ended up being a photo opp for all the other performers as it looked like I had a little sweat shop going!

Using that bonus time I have during the day frees me up later in the day to do other things!

-Louie

Working on the Show

Today I’m starting day four of the doing the new school assembly show. The show is called Incredible Idioms and is at, language and literacy themed shows. This is very different from themed shows that I’ve done in the past. This one has a flow all the way through it. The way it’s written, I can’t easily swap out routines in the show. I really like the way it flows.

In the past with school assemblies, I’ve always had a section where I explain the rules for the audience. This show doesn’t have that, and so far the kids are behaving really well. I think I owe this to the scripting of the show and that there aren’t really any dead spots. There are slow spots, but not really any dead spots.

The warm up to the show is an alarm clock that I put a remote control into and it rings whenever I want it to. This prop is used as the warm up, a running gag and a trick in the show. The trick is that it vanished in a devil’s hank. In my test shows, that clock vanish really fell flat, and I felt that the audience knew the clock was in the hank. The first couple of days in the tour I really focused on making the vanish work for me. It turns out I wasn’t show the back of the hank after the vanish. Once I added showing the other side of the hank, the trick started to hit much harder.

That’s the fun of tours like the one I’m going, it gives you a lot of time to work out problems in the show.

-Louie