2007-08 Dennis' Deliberations

I got a big laugh out of Mark Fitzgerald's line, while doing his card trick at the June Ring meeting. I don't remember his specific words but here is a paraphrase: "This is what is known as the Dribble Shuffle". (He dibbled the cards from his elevated right hand down to his left hand) It is not one of my favorite shuffles. I am an old guy. Anything that reminds me of a dribble is painful! " He then crossed his legs and winced in the face and lowered his knees a bit. It was a funny line! Thanks Mark, and the rest of these lines are for you as a payback...
I do a set number of comedy shuffles myself. I dribble the cards from upper hand to lower, where they plop in large clumps vertically down to my lower hand, and use this patter: "The Cow Pasture Shuffle. .... You had to be there!" (Never fails to get a laugh)
Then I do: The Russian Shuffle (spring cards hand to hand): "One card rushing' after another! " Wiggle deck in a wide arc horizontally in front of an audience member's eyes: "The Pasteurize Shuffle" [Past Your Eyes. Important to immediately follow this pun with a sweep of your hand over your head: BANG! That triggers the recognition of a bad pun.] The Ali Shuffle [Fake a quick boxing scissors move with your legs.] One more: The Politician's Shuffle [toss deck from hand to hand] "You do it. No, YOU do it! No, YOU do it!" The recognition factor: Everyone knows politicians are always 'passing the buck'.
Silly... but we're there to entertain, right? Thanks to Calgary Canada's Larry Thornton for many of those lines.

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I try to cover all types of magic related topics here and nothing is so dear to my heart as the subject of people struggling to be a full-time professional stage magician. Many amateurs have that daydream (or is it a pipe dream?) lodged in the deep dark corners of their mind and the obsession plays over and over again. The plot of the dream is that they are a successful full time stage magician making a real and good living as an entertainer. First... recall the old joke: "How do you make a million dollars as a magician? Start with 5 million!"

Thus has arisen all the seminars, books, packets, tapes, motivational programs, by other "successful magicians", to convince you that you can be a successful full time magician, getting all your expensive health insurance and living costs covered by your fees with enough left over for your own white Corvette and your own private 727 jet, like Tony Blake ("Bill Bixby") in the 70's TV series "The Magician". Okay, lets just say you can pay you bills with a little extra pocket change left over.

After comparing notes with my Canadian friend and full time magician, Larry Thornton, I want to focus on the people that sell these programs that promise that you can be a full-time "pro" with almost no effort if you buy their expensive secrets. As our economy weakens, these ads have started appearing again in the magic trade magazines. In my opinion they are , at their best, mostly purveyors of copious amounts of bovine scatology and at their worst , the makings of severe mental breakdowns in aspiring full time pros.

Before I get into my points, let me separate the "good guys" like Steve Hart, Barry Richardson, Giovanni and many others that will never lead you down a path of emotional devastation. These good guys are focused on effective communication, realistic goals and constructive personal effort and using clever tested ideas on the part of their clients to accomplish success. This is good and valuable advice. None of these friends of mine promise that for $500 they can make you into another David Copperfield. We all need a kick in the fanny now and then to keep us on track. I am in print supporting this issue . You will find my name and contribution to "success in magic" in Volume Three of Frances Ireland Marshall's classic "Success Books". The four volume series belongs in your library.

With that said, let me tell you from the outset that I detest most other "Motivational Speakers" and "Sellers of Success" (again, not all of them but the vast majority of them).This goes for not only the magic vultures and bottom-feeding magic blood sucking leeches but also the secular gurus and multi-level marketing wizards as well as the "Success Theology", mega-church religious preachers.

Their over- the- top optimism is laden with a guilt trip that if you aren't as successful as they are ,or all their successful examples, then you are a worthless piece of human refuse and deserve to be poor and unfulfilled. Built into their pitch is the dogma that everyone can be a multi-millionaire and the reason that you are not successful is because you are simply "Lazy,Stupid or have a Mental Problem"...To me their whole pitch in trying to convince you to buy their outrageously high-priced program, using guilt and shame, makes them lower than whale feces in my eyes. Somehow, America's "Puritan-Calvinistic work ethic" has made us all ripe for that line of thinking. Look, NEVER invite me to an Amway rally...or any of those "think, believe and grow rich" meetings. I may go berserk.

There is a bizarre misconception in many of these gurus of "success" that runs something like this: If "I" can make it, and if "he" can make it, then YOU can make it too! In fact, ANYONE should be able to make it!! ...So after hustling the general public with boiler-room techniques to sell tickets to his fund-raising illusion shows, one American West Coast illusion guru ended up selling his "master program" for "making it" -- to magicians and assorted other suckers for $150 each. I think this was disingenuous, since this illusionist couldn't package and sell his PERSONALITY FOR HUSTLING along with it. THAT was the key to making his promotional system work. But I still like the guy... and his magic.

I have a private pet economic theory I call The Law of Diminishing Returns. FOR EXAMPLE: Within in any small city, of say, half a million people, the number of family, corporate, community, and birthday parties is limited and rarely rises yearly, over the long haul. Now if there are, say, ten magicians working this half million potential client base, and if they are all charging similar rates and they all advertise in their city's Yellow Pages phone directory, they'll all get about the same number of gigs yearly. Providing, of course, that they have a similar size ad, and can follow-up with a decent telephone delivery to those who answer the ad.

The variations occur only with the degree to which some of these ten performers are willing to work at putting in the ADDITIONAL HUSTLE: Making cold calls, re-working past clients (doing follow-ups), sending out regular and frequent mailings, and so on. But what happens here, is that the Hustlers (willing to work harder and smarter) will bring in the extra work mainly at the expense of the competition: the set number of available shows will not grow in total, but will only be re-distributed among the ten available magicians.

Understand that I am not operating from the Supply-side Economic theory, so popular today in America. It is wildly optimistic and asserts that by merely tinkering with taxation, marketing and political and socially psychological optimism, everyone who lusts after wealth will get it. You know: "Morning in America!", "Things are going to keep growing and getting better". This over-bloated optimism and belief in unlimited markets and everlasting growth is believed like a dogmatic cult religion. It is Economics with Eschatology. I prefer a quote by Albert Camus, "The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm." Every Boom carries within it the seeds of its own Depression. (As I write this the Dow is pushing through 14,000 and I have a nosebleed and need a dose of Acetazolamide)

Perhaps my psychological mindset is a bit different due to my education as an engineer. In engineering class we often said, "An optimist sees the glass half-full, the pessimist sees the same glass half-empty, engineers will tell you that the glass is twice the size it needs to be!"

Okay, you people that have grad work in Economics, I concede that my Law of Diminishing Returns as it stands to this point, is over-simplified. I realize that I am infusing my conviction that uncontrolled competitive Capitalism always degenerates into Economic Darwinism. The losers suffer and go extinct. Their pain and loss is then spread to the rest of society. In the end we all pay for dog-eat-dog competition. There is an irrevocable Law of Thermodynamics and Economics that you can not get something from nothing. Thus, show business is always hard work and lots of sheer luck.

The name of the game for the aggressive aspiring magician is to 'muscle out' and annihilate the other advertisers by figuring out some way to make your ad more attractive to the entertainment searcher. And to figure out ways to ingratiate the telephone caller with a superior pitch, even though your prices may not be much out of line (high balled or low balled) against that of the competition. What can you offer that the competition doesn't offer? You must also learn to "play to the client": If the caller is a loose, jolly type person, you may turn him or her off by staying too stiffly business-like. After all, if you're in the business of selling FUN, shouldn't you be reasonably 'fun' while trying to make the sale? Time and again I've heard the line, "Well yeah, I called others, but I didn't like their attitude." OR: "They weren't flexible with their prices." This is basic salesmanship.

Another strong point in favor of making sales is to ALWAYS BE AT YOUR PHONE. Now that isn't always possible, but many entertainers now connect their cell phones to their home phones so that they rarely miss a call. They know that ten minutes can make the difference between getting the gig or losing it. People are odd: Most of them will book the first person they like -- and not hold out for the BEST person to like! Many will go so far as to leave their message on several phones -- and yet book the first person they like who gets back to them, without giving others a chance to get back to them too. Larry says, 'From personal experience before having my cell phone, I've gone out of the house for only a couple of hours, come back, and found a phone message, but when I called the inquirer, they said, "Sorry, I've already found someone." --And sometimes this is the corporate gig that pays the bigger bucks! It is even possible to lose a gig because you have your cell phone on vibrate DURING a magic show!

Another complication within my theory of The Law of Diminishing Returns is that the entertainment available in any city for family events, communities, corporations, promotions (and on and on) is NOT limited to magicians. This is a no brainer. We are also competing with traveling petting zoos, clowns, puppeteers, storytellers, jugglers, Chuck E. Cheese, DVDs, You Tube and other assorted novelty acts and amusement methods. Here in Orlando we compete with the mega and mini-attractions. All of this entertainment actually reinforces my theory of the Law of Diminishing Returns. In other words, the competition is fierce. Thus usually very few entertainers are able to make anything resembling a "good living" out of entertaining in just one area, especially the Orlando area.

The only way out of this morass is to BROADEN YOUR TERRITORY OR YOUR PRODUCT LINE. But by working a larger territory, you run into greater expenses: more traveling; eating on the road; staying in hotels and motels; more advertising (in outlying districts: nearby towns and cities). This in itself leads to still more Diminishing Returns, because you then find yourself spending more money competing with even more entertainers. And you make a lot of additional sacrifices by having to be away from 'home base' a lot of the time. A broadened product line might include: puppets, juggling, walk-around magic, motivational speaking and....yes, selling your 'secrets of success' or conducting seminars on "how to make it"...!

Finally, when you are fiercely competitive and have grown to as big as you can be, you become a Wal-Mart, a Microsoft and a David Copperfield . There are no more worlds to conquer. You have it all. You never learned to live without aggressive growth, or don't have a solid foundation, so you shrivel up and fade away. When this happened to competitive warrior, Alexander the Great, who had conquered the whole known world, he sat down and cried and died. George Patten, whose whole life was competitive and aggressive, smashed the Nazi War Machine. Patton wanted to turn on Stalin and defeat the Soviet Union but President Harry Truman said, "No". and since General Patton had no more wars he was allowed to fight, he shriveled up in a minor occupation command and later died a meaningless death in an overturned jeep.

Understand that the disease of cancer is nothing more than a genetic screw-up creating a disease of uncontrolled aggressive growth . It keeps growing until it kills the organism that supplied it with its materials. Cancer is all "growth" and no defense and that is why chemotherapy can be successful. Chemo attacks ALL the cells and the cancer is so oriented toward growth that it has no defense like the healthy cells have. The cancer cells are killed off like overgrown brush in a controlled burn in a forest. Chemo is horrible but it does often somewhat work . Oncology can teach us a truth about economic life.

Here is the bottom line:

Do magic dealers, who in the process of pumping you up and selling you the next trick that, will make your career, tell you any of this? Do conventions tell you any of this? Do magic clubs or other 'seasoned' pros? Is there a school for entertainers that lay all of this out for you? For most small-time entertainers, there is no chance. Young people longing to get into our racket eventually learn some of these lessons from the school of hard knocks... if they learn any of it at all. --I had to add that last bit ("if they learn any of it at all") because I've found that, when it comes to business, so many wanna-be full time magicians are essentially... brain dead. You'd think that after ten, fifteen, perhaps twenty-five years, they'd ALL catch onto the right way to do things, and over time, become progressively better at selling their talents, as well as developing their talents. It should, in theory, be easy to learn from experience what works... and what is clearly counter-productive.

But you know that many of your compatriots don't learn from experience. They're what I call "Flat-Liners", always making the same mistakes, and always staying at their own level of incompetence when it comes to putting on a good show and selling that show. And if they aren't going to learn these rather simple lessons on their own -- as long as the professionals are still competing with them and in the game of Economic Darwinism, they sure aren't going to learn them from anyone who really knows.

And then there are some of us that know the amount of effort, hard work and sacrifices needed to even get a shot at making a satisfactory living as a full time performer and we don't want to pay the high psychological and relationship costs (marriages, families,health,mental stability). Some us want to sleep at night, knowing that we don't have to awake early every morning and claw our way past the other dead bodies in the show business arena. Some of don't want to face old age with nothing in the bank and no assets and our only friend is Jack Daniels because we risked it all in show business and lost.

Just because we make the choice not to be a part of the gladiator sport of show business does not mean we are " lazy and stupid ". Just because we lack an over-bloated ego and unrealistic appraisal of ourselves does not make us failures.

I hope that none of you get drugged on the elixir of success in full time show business. Give it a shot if you want but don't rest your whole emotional and personal existence on it. Mostly, I hope you don't waste your hard-earned money on anyone selling that phony elixir.

Dennis