Road Problems…

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!

Proper Introductions…

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.

Getting into a Cast…

One of the fun things work this week with World of Wonders this week is that I’m part of cast of performers. That means my duties are more than just my act. I’ve got a small part in another act. I pop my head through the curtain and say a couple of lines. This is something I’ve never really had to do before, aside from performing with my daughter.

In the middle of the run, I had another performer have an idea for my spoon act. This idea would use a second person to introduce my giant spoon. The idea took off! Backstage we then started riffing and before I knew it, it was a fairly fleshed out bit!

This is something that I can’t normally do in my spoon act, however I also don’t know that I’ll be doing the spoon act much longer as part of it probably isn’t very good for my health.

The important thing is even though I don’t know the future of the spoon act (I took it out of my show about 3 years ago), I’m still working on it. It’s got a brief life in the show for 9 days, but I still want it to grow!

Spoon Stunt…

Last week I was hosting a stage at a fair. One of the things that I was doing on stage while the band set up was relearning to do my spoon routine. This routine ends with me sticking a giant spoon to my face. I took this routine out of the show about 2 1/2 years ago, and I’m playing with putting it back into the show.

At this particular fair, I wasn’t expecting to be stage hosting, I thought I was going to be doing roving magic. I had the spoon act and lots of old video of me doing it with me to relearn it at night back at the airBnB.

The first time I put it on the stage, it was a disaster…well not that bad, but it wasn’t good. There were soo many little things that I had forgotten to do or say. However after struggling through the act once, I quickly remembered a lot of the logistical things. Then through out the day, lines started coming back to me. Finally at night when I was back at the house and I got to watch video of it, it all started coming together.

I still have a lot of lines to learn, and some confidence to build up!