2010-04 Dennis' Deliberations

When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things.



-St. Paul -I Corinthians 13:11-

The wonder and mystery of magic is not in the tricks! It is that once bitten, we never recover. Our love for it never ceases to amaze us. For most males it begins about age 10 to 12 in childhood. Somehow magic fills a vacuum or emptiness inside. It is a form of empowerment that the pre-pubescent instinct latches on to. Most people correctly balance their love of magic with a career, a family and with themselves. Some never do. They remain children. It becomes an obsession to be the biggest, the best, the richest and the most acclaimed. All balance in their lives gets lost and they lose their sense of reasoning about the issue. For these it becomes a curse, a millstone around their neck.

I was recently talking by E-Mail with a magician friend and he said:

“If there is the reality of a traditional heaven, I hope there are no magic shops, tricks or magicians there! I hope that with every tear that is whipped away also is the memory of all magic tricks. I hope that it is a release from my earthly addiction to it!”

Magic has been a curse on my life and if I had it to do all over again I would never have even bothered. It wrecked my life, destroyed several career possibilities, was always a sore point in my marriage, it reduced me to a clown-type novelty that no one ever took seriously. I am 52 years old and have no career to look back on. I was always in sales and marketing of other products and things and that was the only source of steady income I ever had. I lost several jobs because magic was more important that doing the other job. I worked my tail off trying to sell and market magic shows and there was never enough income to make it work. It made me miserable at my regular jobs.

I should have trashed all my magic a long time ago and gotten serious and focused about making money. Making a living with magic is impossible despite of what all the worthless gurus say. I have spent over $5,000 or books, tapes and ideas from all the gurus on how to make a living with magic. They are all baloney! Medical insurance, insurance and basic living expenses create a “nut” that is hard to crack. I recently realized that 99% of all the guys you read about in the magic magazines have another day job. I failed at magic because I never was good enough of a performer and I was unwilling to sacrifice my wife and job to risk it. Hearing the Pendragon’s story is something that I can identify with. I am sure that the stress did him in. Was any of what he did, worth it?

It is been a lifetime of wasted energy for me, and I regret all of it! Basically magic is meaningless nonsense….”

How do I answer the guy? Like the Prodigal Son in St. Luke’s Gospel, did he “come to himself”?

The wonder of magic is that it takes a lifetime to finally see the light, after which the hapless conjurer becomes embittered when they finally realize one of their patron saints, Dai Vernon, was right: Magic should only be a hobby.
The wonder of magic is that you can fool people with utterly impossible effects, right before their eyes, so powerfully that it gives you chills to think about how devastating it is -- and the people never take a nanosecond to puzzle it out; never appreciate having just been keen witness to the utterly inexplicable; never give a rat’s backside that you've suspended the laws of reality for a few surreal moments, and all for their entertainment pleasure. Do they deserve the fruits of the many hours, days, weeks, and even years of loving labor the magician has put into his miraculous illusionary endeavors?? Not a chance! A famous composer said, "Any imbecile can listen to music!" The same sentiment could easily apply to magic: Magicians dedicate their entire, pathetic lives to mastering a craft whose only sensible purpose is to amaze and amuse the general public, almost all of whom are essentially "magic imbeciles". There are some magicians that only perform before other magicians. In this case is it the uber-imbeciles performing before other imbeciles?

The “illusion” part is really nothing more than a puzzle to the mind of most people. You can throw in jokes or dress it up with music and dance and theater and enhance the puzzle but as long as people disbelieve that you are anything more than a dispenser of puzzles, the best you can hope for is that they appreciate your cleverness.

Guys like Criss Angel and David Blaine built in the question about whether they really have supernatural powers. I finished up a birthday party and the 30 year old mom and she said how much she and the kids enjoyed my show and then she asked me, “Is that Blaine guy on TV for real?’. The implication was that my “Hippity Hop Rabbits” and “What’s Next” were just puzzles. I was just the silly guy playing with the kids using cheap props.

Then only time I ever have people wondering if I am “for real” is when I do Mentalism. I have never known anyone in clown makeup to do Mentalism, other than a bizarre stunt by Derren Brown. As Lee Earle cautions, kids under about age 10 have no understanding of Mentalism. Rather than predicting the color of the balloon, they want to see the balloon snap in your face.

Scale that up a bit. Do the “kids” that are much older really want to see doves come from silks or women divided into two parts? What is it that can move the emotions and create real mystery in the minds of adults? What can you do that is a real, unquestionable, unsolvable, mind boggling miracle? What can take your audience to the edge. For a while, Copperfield did it with his TV stunts of rearranging national landmarks. Blaine did it by pushing himself to the limits of human endurance.

Take your audience to the edge and you will have arrived! Heaven can then wait.

A Virginia State trooper pulled a car over on I-64 about 2 miles south of the Virginia/ West Virginia Stateline. When the trooper asked the driver why he was speeding, the driver said he was a Magician and Juggler and was on his way to Beckley WV to do a show at the Shrine Circus. He didn't want to be late.


The trooper told the driver he was fascinated by juggling and said if the driver would do a little juggling for him then he wouldn't give him a ticket. He told the trooper he had sent his equipment ahead and didn't have
anything to juggle.

The trooper said he had some flares in the trunk and asked if he could juggle them. The juggler said he could, so the trooper got 5 flares, the juggler lit them and began to juggle.


While the man was juggling, a car pulled in behind the patrol car.. A drunken good old boy from West Virginia got out, watched the performance, then went over to the patrol car, opened the rear door and got in. The trooper observed him and went over to the patrol car, opened the door asking the drunk what he thought he was doing.


The drunk replied, 'You might as well take my drunk butt to jail, cause there ain't no way I can pass that test”

Dennis Phillips