2010-02 Famulus newsletter

Newsletter of IBM Ring #170
The Bev Bergeron Ring
Next general meeting Wednesday, 02/17/2010 at 7:30 PM SHARP

Meeting theme:

I-HOP Kirkman Road
5203 Kirkman Road, Orlando, Florida 32819

Please join us for dinner beforehand

Lunch meetings in the McDonald’s at 7344 Sand Lake Road, Orlando. It’s two blocks WEST of the intersection of Interstate 4 and Sand Lake Road. We meet every Tuesday at noon upstairs.

Website: http://www.ring170.com/

F. A. M. E. is the Florida Association of Magical Entertainers
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Directory
Craig J. Fennessy – President – CraigFennessy@gmail.com
Chris Dunn- Vice President – Youngdunns@yahoo.com
Art Thomas – Treasurer – srjart@earthlink.net
Sheldon Brook- Acting Secretary – mrbrook33@yahoo.com
James Songster- Director at Large, - JjTjMagic@aol.com
Joe Vecciarelli- Sgt at Arms - talkingmute@tampabay.rr.com
Stefan Bartelski – Editor of “Famulus”- Famulus@illusioneer.com
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GET PUBLISHED!
Got an idea for an article to add to the next FAMULUS? Put it in the body of an email or in a Word document attached to an email. Send it to Famulus@illusioneer.com, and we will get you in print.
Please, please, please, use the above e-mail address, your messages are in danger of getting lost if you do not do so.

2010-02 From the Editor

Apologies to the Ring, due to technical difficulties (a broken laptop) this newsletter was published much later than it should have been. I have learned how much we rely on technology today, and how great the inconvenience when it fails.

Hopefully this delay was not too inconvenient for anyone.

After all the cold weather in Florida (and yes, Dennis, I know you will say what we experienced is not cold) I am sure everyone is looking forward to the arrival of Spring and warmer weather. Spring brings us a special magic link, as the Harry Potter area at Universal will open. What magic will be on display when this new part of a theme parks opens?

Looking forward to seeing some of you at the Flea Market next month

Your editor
Stefan

2010-02 Dan Stapleton to appear at Wizardz 2/22

Only 50 seats available. Reserve now by calling Wizardz at 863-307-9400 or magic@ij.net

2010-02 Magic Club Takes To The Streets?

[Are things really this bad that our members are taking to street magic? - Editor ;-)]

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/breakingnews/os-warnings-issued-card-tricksters-20100203,0,639113.story

Joe Vecciarelli
Coach Coordinator
Cirque du Monde - Orlando
Walt Disney World Boys & Girls Club

2010-02 Request for magic help

Greetings!

Hope this e-mail finds you doing well.
In just a few weeks I am planning to film a follow-up to the Roadrunner Cull DVD.

The contents are up on-line and a special offer for a pre-order.

PLEASE take a minute of your time to let me know what you thought of the first DVD by filling out this 5 question survey.

Be A Part of Volume 2.

THANK YOU!

All the best!
Kostya

p.s. if the link above doesn't work, just copy and paste the following into your browser: http://www.kostyamagic.com/beapartofvolumetwo.php

 

2010-02 Book Review “Beating a Dead Horse, The Life and Times of Jay Marshall” by Sandy Marshall

Jay Marshall told his son Sandy to write the story of Jay’s life “after I croak”. What Sandy ended up writing was several stories. It is about Jay’s life but it is also about Sandy’s life and his interaction and non-interaction with Jay’s life. It is also a story about Jay’s friends, many of whom were magicians and it is a story about the history of entertainment in the twentieth century and how it changed with the advent of television. It is also a love story. Jay and Frances were married for almost 48 years and her death in 2002 took a toll on Jay and he became very despondent.

One of Jay’s friends and his roommate in New York City was Lee Noble (ne Edwin Burchell). He is mentioned 8 times in the book. Lee was a member our Ring for many years and died in 2003 in a car accident. I saw him MC an evening magic show at a magic convention once where he was very polished and smooth and I saw him usher at the Bob Carr Theatre many times (I guess theater was in his blood). In all those years I never knew of his background in New York or that he was a friend of so many great magicians. That is why the tributes to the great magicians that Dan Stapleton has done are so important.

I saw Jay at several magic conventions over the years where I saw him do his act with Lefty and he always got a great response from the audience. You think that you know someone by watching them perform or talking to them for a few minutes but as this book shows I really did not know Jay Marshall at all. Jay billed himself as one of the better cheaper acts. He was on Ed Sullivan 14 times and opened for Frank Sinatra in September 1951 when Frank first went to Las Vegas. He married Al Baker’s daughter, a love child of Al and a nice Jewish lady named Miss G. Graft, who lived in Canada. The story of how Al presented his daughter Naomi as a talented young woman who was a great cook to Jay (when she was neither) is a lesson in great misdirection. They had two boys and were officially married 13 years but the relationship ended after nine years when Jay moved into an apartment with Lee Noble in Manhattan.

Jay was in two Broadway plays and played all of the big venues in New York in the late 1940’s and 1950’s. Jay was on television from the beginning starting in 1940 and was on all of the major shows; Ed Sullivan, Milton Berle, Garry Moore, Sid Caesar, Kate Smith, Jackie Gleason, and even the Morning Show hosted by Walter Cronkite, before Cronkite went to the news side of television. Jay even wrote a book, “TV-Magic and You” which he labeled the poor man’s Encyclopedia of Television Technique.

Jay’s youngest son, Sandy, found himself with an abusive step father when his mother Naomi remarried. Sandy rebelled and Naomi sent him to his father, who had married Frances Ireland, nine years older than Jay. Frances did not like the intrusion than Sandy made in her life with Jay. Needless to say there was much conflict with the new family of Jay, Frances and Sandy. Sandy spent much of his life trying to prove to his dad that he was more than just, Jay’s kid. Sandy went on to win two Emmy’s.

Late in Jay’s life he became the good family man that he never was in the first seventy years of his life. Besides stage and television Jay loved to do Punch and Judy shows. He also was one of the first trade show magicians working for Chevy. Jay was a consummate collector and had over a million books in his collection when he died on May 10, 2005 at age 85. It is a great book for any magician interested in Jay Marshall or in what the entertainment industry was like in the last half of the twentieth century. After reading the book I feel that I know Jay Marshall a little better.

Gary Adams

2010-02 Dennis' Deliberations

"The people long eagerly for two things -bread and circuses."     Juvenal       Roman rhetorician, satirical poet (c. 60-140 A.D.)
I heard about the Orlando controversy between the Fox Network and its place on Bright House cable.  Fox wanted more money for their content and threatened to pull the plug on their signal to cable. Attorney John Morgan represented some guy who appeared ready to have nervous breakdown from losing his TV football game. For now the issue seems resolved. I predict more wars between cable and content providers. Most of you know that Comcast Cable system just bought NBC from GE. The new owners inherit the Jay Leno fiasco. His programming move from 11:30 to 10:00PM has proved a disaster. He and his format weren’t ready for prime time. I don’t think that even Johnny Carson would have worked in prime time. I gave up on Leno years ago when his show degenerated into making fun of people. Recall that most of his comedy bits are making fun of ignorant people. I do not doubt his comedy premises but do viewers enjoy him rubbing our national noses in the fact that many Americans, especially the young ones, don’t know anything, can not spell and have no organized mental thought process?  By the way, who was buried in Grant’s Tomb? 

What does my dear wife use to chase away the Virginia darkness and the winter isolation?  Television.  The idiot box. We have a wide screen Hi-Def set.  I spend my time in the basement watching magic videos on my DVD player in front of an old CRT tube or reading or watching You Tube.
The daylight hours are shorter here, since we are further north here in Virginia. Dawn, during the dead of winter, is at 7:20AM and dusk is at 4:45PM. The leaden overcast skies make the days seem even shorter.  TV is the antidote. In Russia it is Vodka. I do not know which is worse. It is a case of either rotting your brain or rotting your liver.
Upstairs the idiot box squawks on. Look, I used to work in commercial television. It was not like the almost complete mindless nonsense on today!  Sure, we had Gilligan’s Island, but a better proportion of the even prime time shows had artists and literary quality and variety shows still had a place in prime time.
Today, occasionally a magician is on. Jeff Dunham, filthy humor and all, is on with his ventriloquism shtick on the Comedy Channel but otherwise magic is seldom seen on TV. I long for the days when variety shows were a staple of broadcast television. 


I am so sick of reality shows; I am tempted to throw my wife’s TV out the window. Most of them are fake, and the people whose lives revolve around watching that garbage need to get a life. A psychological study was done in 2004 to find out why reality TV is so popular (http://nisonger.osu.edu/papers/Reisswiltz_2004.pdf). The report is a bit on the heavy side of reading, but these were the main conclusions based on 16 basic human desires:

1. The results showed that status is the main motivational force that drives interest in reality television. The more status-oriented people are, the more likely they are to view reality television and report pleasure and enjoyment. People who are motivated by status have an above-average need to feel self-important.
2. Reality television viewers are more motivated by vengeance than are non viewers. The desire for vengeance is closely associated with enjoyment of competition.

Are Americans that angry and status hungry?  Don’t answer that!
TV is mostly junk in my opinion... It's easy to criticize reality TV. It totally stinks, but that is not the point. America sacrificed quality content to the almighty dollar decades ago. I am old enough to remember Playhouse 90 and CBS Reports.  Networks are in a highly competitive and fragmented situation today so they have to turn a profit and the equation is: advertising revenue – the cost of production = gross profit. Reality TV is cheap to produce and it generates enough of an audience to make it attractive to advertisers. TV is going to get a lot worse before it starts getting better and the odds are we will never see another era where the networks compete based on quality. As harsh as all of this sounds, we are getting exactly what we are asking for as a society.
Remember the good old black-and-white Goodson/Toddman shows like "What's my line" and "Password" - which were entertaining and made you actually use your brain? Yes, some of us remember when MTV actually played rock videos, when A&E really meant "Arts" and Entertainment.  Now it's no Arts and very little Entertainment.  Remember when you could actually learn something on The Learning Channel? Those were the days.  Remember the Ed Sullivan Show and The Magic Land of Allakazam?  I am disgusted the way “America’s Got Talent” selects and harshly treats magicians.
Even the Weather Channel has begun to include more non-weather related content. They were running some “home improvement” thing the other day while it was snowing like heck outside my window and I did not know how safe the route was to pick up my kids in Hagerstown or when the snow would end and how much would stick. A local TV station was rerunning the weather from 2 days before because the weatherman could not get into the station. I called up the TV manager and told him the least they could do is get the guy Skype or an I-Phone so he could do the report from his house.
So when did TLC, The Learning Channel, become The Dysfunctional Family and Surgical Monstrosities-All-the-Time-Channel? And why does VH1 call itself that? There are no videos on that channel, just bad trashy attention-starved people who think that a lack of talent can be overcome by being as disgusting as possible in a search for quasi-stardom. I see TV as a modern day barometer gauging our society as it is today, and a predictor for our future. As I see it now, TV hit its peek years ago and it's now on the decline, as is our own society in decline.
Our society is becoming a sicker society, tainted with entertainment interests in watching other people fail and getting a thrill from it – Reality TV.  “Jon and Kate plus 8 now minus one- to be continued” Who cares?  Kate got a new hairdo. Who cares?
Yes, I guess there is a good definition of Reality TV: It's showing us for who we really are, a country full of creeps? On top of all this, money fuels it and helps drive the networks to gear shows to generate more money, regardless of whether or not it's any value, or that we are any better by watching it. It is a self-perpetuating downward spiral.
I know people who go home and watch DVR'ed shows all night while they are DVR’ing more shows at the same time. That makes no sense! Get a life. I would rather go for a jog and lose a few pounds than watch a dozen weepers crash diet their way through The Biggest Loser. Need a resolution? Go take a dance lesson when Dancing with the Stars is on. Go to a local concert or a karaoke night. Organize a drawer, reupholster a chair, or plant a flower instead of watching HGTV for ten hours. Turn off Joyce Meter , Joel Osteen and Benny Hinn and just read your Bible for yourself!   Magicians! Get out and do a magic show for a needy cause! 
One evening my wife was sitting at the dining room table doing a craft project. The TV was off.  I asked, “Why are you doing a craft project?”  She said, “We have 725 TV channels and the DVR has 26 hours of shows that I have saved. We spend $94 a month but really there is nothing worth watching”…   Yes!!!  My wife is coming to her senses!  

Enough of this stuff lets talk magic!

I have a mentalism bit that I perform every once in a while. It is a Headline Prediction! This one does not seem to use a stooge and no one would believe that it could. 

 I ship a package to the show sponsor a week before the show.  It is a cardboard box that contains inside an aluminum foil wrapped clear plastic box with a small wooden chest (3 by 3 by 5 inches) inside “to keep it sealed”. (Chests are available at Michael’s Crafts and other stores).   

The daily newspaper is brought forward. The cardboard box has been in the sponsor’s possession ever since it was received the week before.

I have the sponsor open the cardboard box. Inside they find the aluminum foil wrapped clear plastic box. The excuse is to prevent x-rays. “If someone knew the future they could make millions by betting on events.  To prevent this and to preserve my sanity I never try to predict a headline but a more trivial event. There is an ancient Greek proverb that says, “Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they reveal the future!”

We both peel back the foil on the outside of the clear plastic case. The wooden chest is removed from the inside of the plastic case with foil on it.

I call for my assistant to come forward and hold her (or his) hands out with their finger tips vertical to the floor so they can gently hold the internal locked wooden chest by the ends.

The newspaper is opened and I have the sponsor take the chest and put it in front of him on the table.  Here is where you have options as to the “Prediction”.  I never tell anyone up to this point that this is a Headline Prediction act. The reason is that if there is a major tragedy you are locked into a real “downer” when it comes to revealing the headline.  If there is a happy headline, by all means use it.  If not then say that you had a mental block on the front page due to the nature of the headline.

Your out will be this: Stress that you “visualized” a single page. Have the sponsor turn to page 3  as you seemingly vaguely recall a specific number in one of the stories in the 3^rd or fourth column. It was the number of people getting rebates on something (use any trivial story with a few facts).    I stand away and the guy opens the chest and inside is a white card that fills the chest and on it is written “Page 4 Column 3   396 people”.

Sure enough in the paper on page 4, Column 3 is that number.

I have actually done this predicting 3 stock closing prices!    AXP  36.52  etc.  You may have Financial Planners following you out the door!

The secret?  A stooge!  Not the Sponsor but my assistant who holds the chest for the brief time!  They have a “thumb writer” on their thumb.  The craft box is doctored by sanding the slit on the back where the lid hinges.  The card is partly inserted through the slit with most of it hanging out the back where it can be easily written on with a thumb writer. I pre-write the known parts and my assistant fills in the specifics. 

I think that this may have originally been “The Jack London Prediction Chest”. I never saw the manuscript or confirmed the creator of this. I was shown the method in the late 60s by Chuck Windley when I was working for him.   It is a goodie!  Try it!

I can say that after reading Sheldon’s excellent Ring Reports and from my E-mail contacts with those of you that have not forgotten me, “Good things are always happening in Ring 170!”

Dennis Phillips