In my show I do a joke about a kid losing a glass eye during the show. I thought it would be funny to add a visual gag to the verbal joke. The gag works for when you’re doing a multi show type of gig, but it doesn’t work for single show. I ordered a glass eye, and now I have one in my prop case!
The gag works, and I’m glad I spent the $25 on a glass eye, however the gag can be better. Most people don’t know that a glass eye is basically flat, it’s just the front 1/4 of the eye. People think it’s a whole globe that would be a sphere. I think if I managed to find a good looking sphere, the gag would play better.
I guess there’s only one way to find out…track down a round glass eye!
There’s a social media group of performers and they’re complaining about gas prices. Here’s the thing, gas prices were higher in the past than they are now. We had higher gas prices in 2008 and from 2011-2014 and that’s without adjusting for inflation, that’s a straight dollar to dollar comparison.
Some people are talking about adding a gas surcharge to their show fee. I think this is a bad idea. Here’s why, it makes buying a pain for the client:
How do you implement it? If gas prices drop, so you remove the surcharge? What date do you use for your price threshold?
Instead of having your worth tied to the price of a gallon of gas, you should just raise your rate. I’m assuming you’re worth more than you were last year, or five years ago. Your show has improved, maybe you’ve picked up some national TV credits, or had a video go viral.
If you’re doing the same show they same way you’ve been doing it for a decade, this may be a hard sell to your client and tying your price to the cost of gas might be the only way you can get a pay raise.
Let’s do some math.
For a local gig, let’s say your round trip is 100 miles, your car gets 20 miles per gallon and gas in 2021 is up from 20 cents to just below 70 cents per gallon from 2019. That means you’ll burn 5 gallons of gas at 70 cents a gallon, and it will have cost you $3.50 more in gas to drive 100 miles than it did in 2019.
Are you honestly going to put a line item for $3.50 in gas on your invoice?
If I was booking someone and they wanted me to pay $3.50 for a gas surcharge, I’d laugh in their face. You’re not teenage driver getting their friends to chip in on a trip to the mall.
If your profit margin is soo tight that $3.50 will make you unprofitable, you need to seriously reassess your business!
Be better than you were last year, raise your rate, and use that to justify why you’re worth more.
A couple of days ago I finished up my run at a 22 day gig (that took place over 30 days). I’m reflecting on all of the work I got done on the show over the 66 shows I did. Every show I was working on something. Sometimes it was a full routine, and sometimes it was small, like adding some confetti to a bit in the that I do with a kid.
For me, it’s all about trying to get better every show. Yes, there are some shows where you shouldn’t be trying or tweaking and you do just all A material. However I have the most fun when I can get on stage and play with ideas.
Here’s my stats for new stuff over the last month: Hand held mic technique went from a D to a C+ Invisible deck like routine went from D to a B Spoon and Fork went from C to B Drawing routine went from B to A Foam hand went from D to C Game show went from D to B
Having 66 shows to start to level up routines is a good use of the run of shows! I feel like I left there a better performer, writer and magic creator!
Last night I was at a sports bar watching hockey and in between periods I popped into the social media and in a group for children’s performers I saw this post:
For fun I wrote 10 of them…I wasn’t doing anything, it was between periods of the hockey game. It wasn’t hard, you just needed to find things that have an “ah”sound or sound similar to that and you’re off!
You’ll notice that I put a little note at the end of my list. The reason I did was that I think one of the problems with magicians is that they try to get people to give them the answer to a problem before they try to solve it first. In my list I put in the work…so should you. It’s not hard, I literally spent 10 minutes coming up with my list.
“sure, it’s easy for you because you’re creative” would be someone’s excuse for not trying. I’m no more creative than anyone else. I just sat down and did the work. I actually farmed out most of the work to an online rhyming dictionary.
Do the work, then show your work when you ask for help. Seeing that people have put in some sort of effort makes a huge difference in the quality of help you get.
A few days ago, I wrote about post about rewriting a prediction on larger paper and the trick playing better (you can read it here). I’m now running into a new challenge with the prediction, if there’s a little bit of wind, it will warp and it’s hard to read the whole thing.
The nice thing is that the prediction is revealed and read 1/4 of the page at a time, so if the top bends, that information has already been revealed to the audience. However seeing the whole thing is a better picture.
While I probably won’t have time to try this in the next few days, a solution would to be put a line of tape on the back of it. Maybe just around the edges and and X across the middle. That would give it some support. If that doesn’t work, I could completely line the back with tape. That would essentially be laminating the back of the prediction.
It’s been two months and I’m still going through the book The Artist’s Way. I will say the book is a bit “hippie” for my taste, but if you can get past that, it’s a great book. I honestly think the last eight weeks (the whole book is twelve weeks) have been a very creative time. I’ve really ramped up my creative output of the material in my show.
If you decide to get the book, commit to it. There’s some spiritual stuff that I’m not a fan of, and I just plow through that and do the work. I also feel it’s not written for someone who is out there actively doing their “art” for a living. A lot of the book addresses things that block you from showing people your art. Do the exercises anyway, you may learn a little bit about yourself.
As for creating magic, I find that I’m doing a lot more brainstorming with myself than I used to do. I’m essentially having a morning magic jam in a notebook. It’s great!
Despite all of things I don’t like about the book, the things that I like outweigh them, and I really recommend it! -Louie
I thought I was done with the virtual shows, but last night I was back at it! Doing this show as a nice change of pace from the three shows a day I’m doing at a state fair all month.
This was a corporate gig that was for the employees and their families. This was a fun group! One thing I’ve noticed with virtual shows is the time really flies by, compared to a live show. I think that with an in person show, time travels soo much slower. I think it’s because I’ve done it in person soo much that I have to think less. With the virtual I’m constantly on my toes.
In my virtual show my daughter usually runs the production end of the show and in it I normally do a prediction that she helps me out with, but unfortunately she wasn’t available last night. So I had to had to do it all solo. Running the production part is easy, but doing the prediction was going to be a bit of a challenge. Normally the prediction we do is my “Wheel of dinner”. I was going to modify it to a “wheel of costumes” as the client wanted some Halloween themed tricks. The problem was how I was going to accomplish the trick. With the wheel there are 20 options and it doesn’t force. There are ways to force from the wheel, but I really like just spinning it. It feels random.
It hit me, a while ago I had bought Manifest by Danny Weiser, which is a prediction on a luggage tag and never used it. I hung the luggage tag in the background, and during the course of a trick, I asked someone what they were going to be for Halloween. Then at the end of the trick, I did the reveal of the prediction. It played really well. I like a prediction, where the prediction is not the routine, but a bonus…especially because I takes a lot of the heat off of the method!
One thing that you do when you perform at a lot of events is “media”. This is when you get up super early in the morning to entertain the local morning news or visit a radio station. Later last night I was called to do media this morning, and all of my gear was at the fairgrounds and that was about half an hour out of the way from where I was going. I really didn’t want to get up any earlier than I had to.
I had a deck of cards and a sharpie in my car, so I was confident I could make it happen with just that. In my wallet I have short show that’s always ready to go. Having this on me at all times has saved my butt on my occasions, and opened some doors.
One of the tricks in my impromptu wallet show is my mismade bill routine that I call Splitting Image. The picture below is the finale of this routine!
The effect is you take a picture of them holding a regular dollar bill with their phone, then you rip it in half. You restore the bill, but backwards…then the picture on their phone now has the bill in the mismade condition!
What I like is that this trick doesn’t rely on technology, so there’s no apps to use, it’s just the camera on their phone. It’s low tech, and 100% reliable!
If you don’t have a wallet show, you really should…or at least think about it and what you could do with just the stuff that’s in your wallet. -Louie
I’m still working through using a handheld microphone in the show. There’s definitely a learning curve. I’m getting better at it, but it’s an uphill slog. I have a lot of points where I’m holding the mic in my hand, then put it in the stand for a moment, only to quickly remove it.
I really like how when I’m holding the mic in my hand, I’m a lot more expressive with my hands than when I’m wearing just a headset. I think holding the mic makes me more aware of what my hands are doing. It also puts a hand up near my face, so I can play more with motion that’s motivated.
As I get deeper into my show, I’m realizing that there’s going to be a lot of spaces where I’ll need to use the mic neck holder. That’s fine, I’ll need a joke to address it. Today I have to figure out how to do the reveal of the object in ball of yarn that’s the end of the longest routine in the show. I had to chunk this routine out into three bits to figure out the blocking, and today will be the third bit to figure out.
Having a gig where I’m doing 66 shows at all month is a great opportunity to work on new material. I’m still working on my idea for the Invisible Deck. It’s coming along. I’m now using Phoenix Large Index Cards. The bigger index makes it play a row or two further back.
One thing I’m realizing is that this trick is going to be limited to the size of room it can play. I’m going to need to figure out a way to scale the trick back up to either a Phoenix Parlour sized deck or a jumbo deck. It’s interesting how the process works, I had to shrink the trick to figure out why I need to enlarge it!
So why not just go back to using the Vernet 52 B’Wave?
The main reason is the routine I was doing required 3 jumbo decks and didn’t really have a routine for it. By changing the method, I ended up finding a presentational hook for the trick, which ultimately helps the routine. Yes, I could do my routine with the 52 B’Wave, but now that’d bump it up to travelling with four jumbo decks, and that’s a lot of weight in case for a card trick!
I think the method may end up being some sort of hybrid method, where the reveal deck is similar to the 52 B’Wave deck, but with different reveal cards, and reveal cards that aren’t gimmicked, so they can be shown more freely.
Another reason I’m playing with a different method is that there’s a sense of pride I have when I perform with original methods.
