Cheap Advice
The past few weeks I have been going to the “Open Mic” night at a local comedy club to work on some material. Open Mic nights are good places to, well, “not be brilliant” in front of a non-magician, non-family-member audience, because they’ll be totally honest in their responses to your material. Here are some [...]
Moving to a new base of operations can mean that all your regular haunts – the places where you perform – are not accessible to you. No one in his right mind (wait, we’re talking about RenFaire people and magicians here) wants to travel a couple of days to go somewhere to perform for not [...]
“… you can amaze people once or twice, but if you can make them laugh you can entertain them forever.” Jeff Dunham, All By My Selves I like to call myself a “hack magician”. “Hack” in this case is a bit of self-deprecating humor, implying that I know that I’m not the greatest magician in [...]
A friend of mine, Steven Moore (of the now famous Knight of the Living Dead Kindle book!) and I were talking about what it’s like doing more than one “job”, that is, being a magician and doing something as a “day job”. Steven has had a few full time magicians give him grief about not [...]
Magicians are, by their nature, rather reclusive. We tend to practice by ourselves or with small groups of fellow magicians. We usually go out to gigs on our own or, in the case of larger acts, with our partners and crew. Regardless of how many or how few people you have as part of your [...]
In gigging (that strange semi improv thing Ren Fair performers do on the street), there are very few rules. The biggest rule is this: Any challenge or situation you are put into, your response should always be “Yes, and -” You should always build on what’s put in front of you. When building, do your [...]
Sorry to have been away for so long! I’m working on getting things back up to speed with this humble blog. In January, I was fortunate enough to spend a weekend in Seattle with Jeff McBride in a seminar. He reminded me of something which we festival entertainers might keep in mind when it comes [...]
One of the things I find myself doing from time to time is wandering through craft stores. Usually I’m doing this because my wife wants to go to one, but… I’ve found a lot of useful stuff wandering the rows of scrapbooking, wood, paint and random other supplies. Poster board, too. It’s odd, but in [...]
(Editorial note: This was posted originally from my Droid Phone and apparently said phone did not agree with my post. I’m discussing that issue with the phone now.) A while back I was talking to another performer regarding … another performer (yes we do that, anyone in any indistry does that) and he said, of [...]
Continue reading about The most imporant thing in a festival show
I made, as you know, a scouting run to the Rose Festival’s Waterfront Village a week ago last Sunday to see what things looked like regarding the stages upon which I would be performing (convoluted sentence structure GO!). One of the things I had been told was that the stages were in fact covered. I [...]
