One of the trends in the county/state fair market is the fair putting the performers up in a house like an Air BnB instead of a hotel. Usually this is a great thing, I haven’t been housed with anyone I don’t get along with…yet.
The camaraderie that’s built hanging out at night BS’ing over a few beers around the table is one of my favorite things. In the carnival world that call it “cutting up jackpots“
This is also where a lot of networking and creative brainstorming happens. I know some performers like a space to themselves, but they are missing out one of my favorite parts of working on the road!
Right now I’m reading the book Stolen Focus, it’s about how the bombardment of information we get overwhelms us and the distraction that social media is. I’m not too far into yet, but it’s definitely interesting and is motivating me to make some changes in my life.
When I started doing my morning writing first thing in the morning, I was travelling and would do it in the kitchen of the long term Air BnB that I was staying at. As my travels became more hotel based or I was home more often, I did it at my desk with my computer nearby. Just having the laptop next to me, meant I tended to look up things more often, which isn’t a bad thing, until you realize that sometimes end up on searching for things or visiting websites that aren’t necessary to the task at hand.
I did some searching and found a chrome browser extension called Pause. What it does is you have a list of websites that it pauses before you can access them. You can edit the list of websites and the length of the pause. When you go to the website you get a green page that won’t let you access the website you’re trying to get to for 5 seconds (or whatever you set it at). I find this really helpful to keep me on task. Once I see the screen, I realize I’m mindless clicking or trying to mindlessly scroll around.
Adding the Pause browser extension and going back to doing my morning writing at the kitchen table really have gotten my creative productivity back on track!
While in Arizona last week I visited Organ Stop Pizza and I wrote a little bit about it yesterday. Today I’m writing about something else that I noticed with performance. In many of the songs the organist played, there was lighting changes:
The room was normally dark, and when he got towards ends of song and it had a big ending, he would lighten up the room for the finale, then darken it at the end. While these songs were songs that had more exciting endings, the lighting change end really signaled the crowd to clap and cheer louder.
This is a technique used in many theater shows, sometimes ending the trick with a blackout. I’m sure there’s a name for it in theater terms, I just don’t know it. However it’s a way to signal the end of a trick or routine that may have less off a definite and hard punctuation at the end.
The organist used the lighting very deliberately and very effectively. Personally I’m a pretty basic lighting guy, and that’s probably because I came out of stand up comedy rooms, and not theaters. However it’s something I would like to explore more.
When I was in Arizona last week I went to Organ Stop Pizza in Mesa, AZ. This is pizza place that has a guy play a giant Wurlitzer organ.
One the the things that I found interesting was the people around me commented about all of the songs he knows. He takes requests and they are pretty varied in genre. What the people didn’t notice was that he had device to his left just out of view that he was using for the songs he didn’t already know.
This is an interesting suspension of disbelief, which is different from when you see Peter Pan and ignore the wires that make him fly. This a suspension of disbelief closer to doing magic. The audience wanted him to have a huge catalog of music in his head, so that’s what they believed, despite all of his typing.
In magic you want the audience to believe you can do the trick…not necessarily by “magic” but you can do the trick successfully. Once you convivence them that you can you can take a lot of risks and they will unconsciously suspend disbelief and be onboard with things.
Juan Tamariz talks about this in The Magic Rainbow. Basically he says that once they audience is onboard with him, he can do things that would be easily explained. He does them after he’s proven himself, and the audience suspends disbelief that he’s simply using a trick prop.
I was watching the organist arrange his set list of requests. He has a couple of songs he knows, then plays a one he doesn’t know, then a medley of 3-5 songs and I think one or two of these he doesn’t know well, but can bookend with known songs and finally he plays a couple songs he knows well. It’s a great plan, it’s also the Juan Tamariz formula.
I just wrapped up performing at my first fair of 2022 and this fair has reminded me that to be successful performing at a fair you need a lot more than a good act. You need to be flexible as there are soo many unexpected variables.
The fair I was at has soo many challenges. One of the biggest ones was that it way very windy. By windy, I mean it would blow my table over. I’ve had to deal with that before sometimes the solution is simply to unscrew the top off my table and set it on the floor.
The stage was mostly in the Arizona sun all day, which bakes your props. I do a trick with keys and by the time I got to that routine they were physically uncomfortable to touch. The solution was to put strings on the end of the keys, so people could hold them by the string.
Then there was the blowing dust. Unfortunately there really wasn’t a solution to that. All that really can be done is to either pause until it stops or power through it.
Having performed at many fairs in the past, I’m aware of the challenges and while I’d prefer to not have the wind blow over my table, I’m equipped to handle them. Fairs will make you a better performer because you’ll have to deal with pretty much everything from weather, to people, to venue challenges. If you can figure out how to adapt, you can figure out how to work your show virtually anywhere.
Sometimes I see people post things on social media that confuses me. I will also agree that I maybe old and not seeing things with a young person’s lens. The other day someone in a magic group asked if anyone still uses a website. What they meant by that is that they only have a facebook page…and that’s how they book all of their work.
I think just having a facebook page is a bad idea for several reasons. First of all you put all of your eggs in someone else’s basket that you have no control over. Second they’re soo much distraction that they can get when looking you up, that you really don’t have their dedicated attention. Finally if your name is hard to spell, or there’s more than one person with your name, it can be hard for someone to find you easily.
Why not just have a domain name you use and have it redirect to facebook? That solves two of the three of the problems of just using a facebook page. If facebook becomes the digital Sears, you can simply point your domain to a new space. You can also pick an easily spelled and remembered domain name that you can give to people.
Having a domain doesn’t solve the problem of distraction. Someone looking to book you will still have all of their facebook notifications on the top popping up.
Domains are cheap at about $20 a year, that’s less than $2 a month. Suck it up and buy a domain. -Louie
I think I’ve written about this before, but Hondo’s Flap Cards are amazing! These are essentially cards that change from one card to another. I frequently do quick little videos for events that I perform at for them to use on their social media and I usually use a flap card.
Here’s one I recently did:
What makes the flap card so great is that I can get two changes in very fast while delivering the message. Also it’s a very visual trick that doesn’t have a phase where I have to prove something, like showing a box empty. For me, these cards fit the bill!
I’m getting ready to head out for the beginning of my “Fair” season of 2022. My first one for this year is also the first one that I had cancel on me in 2020 and it also ended up cancelling in 2021. I recently did an interview with a reporter and did a quick search for the article. It doesn’t look like it’s been published yet, however I did find this one from right before the 2020 fair:
I like how the article does get a little bit of my “flavor” in there about going to ghost towns. It really doesn’t do a lot to put butts in seats, the show description lacks a lot of sizzle. I think it may not have been the writers fault, I may have not told them about the show in a super exciting way.
Reading this makes me remember how important it is for me to convey specific things and emotions from the show. Also, the line about me debuting a trick, I need to sell that a lot more. It’s lacking a ton of sizzle.
The season is just getting started, and I’ll have more chances to work on it! -Louie
One thing that struck me was the amount of love for the Amazing Jonathan I’m seeing in FB posts.
It’s not the love for him that’s surprising, it’s the people who are doing it. There are a lot of people who I know have swiped gags from the Amazing Jonathan’s show and use them in their show, but are posting RIP’s on their social media. Are they really mourning his passing, or are they mourning the passing of their source free material.
These posts are like being sad when circuit city whet out of business, but not being sad because you were a customer, but because you used to shoplift laptops and it was easy to steal from. If you’re really sad he’s passed, you’d put the rest all of the gags stole from his show.
We’re wrapping up our first move for the first time in 16 years, and it’s amazing what you accumulate over a decade and half. At our new place I set up my collection of three shell game sets, and I have more than I thought I had, and in the picture below there are no duplicates:
There are some interesting sets in the collection. For example I have three sets of Rivera Shells that are all made out of very different material. There are both sets of Karl Normal Shell Game which are bowls, the original run has a divot in the top, where the second run of them doesn’t.
The shell game set I own that’s not pictured is my main working set. I really should get a second set as a back up, and to have in the display.
