2010-07 Dennis’ Deliberations

I have not given you a lot of details about my regular gig at the local Hookah Lounge. I will try to give you the complete low-down on what I do and how it all works.

The Hookah Lounge is the oddest gig I have ever been involved with in magic…

The Hookah Lounge was in the upstairs of an old “Café and Wine Bar”. The old place was an upscale artsy wine bar that never took off. They used the upstairs as a quiet sit down lounge where could go upstairs and be away from the city street level visibility and sounds. It used to look like a fancy den in someone’s home with a small raised stage at one corner with a mic. The owner was an older New Jersey guy who remembered the historic Borscht Belt style of entertainment and he tried to do it upstairs and run a yuppie wine bar on the street level. I don’t think this area can support such a concept. It never went anywhere.

I met the original owner after my wife and I stopped in after walking around the downtown for a deli lunch. We had just gotten into town last summer. We were about the only people in the bar and the owner came over to talk and try to turn us into regulars. It was not long before I knew his history and he knew mine.

He said, “Hey! You ‘get it’. I have an opening on Tuesday nights and if you want to come in and work 7 to 10pm, its all yours. Keep the tips” So I did and for 3 months it was abysmal. Rarely were there more than 3 tables an evening and most of them were 30-somethings cheating on their relationships who did not want to be seen or entertained. The place was an ideal “cheaters” lounge. I suggested, jokingly, that it be renamed, “The Scarlett Letter”. A cheater could park in one of many lots and not be traced to the place and there were ways of sitting that could protect your secret.

Finally the owner decided that he needed an income and he did not want to wait for profitability so he sold the place to a Middle Eastern family. The only workers are all in the same family, the father, the mother and the 4 sons! The upstairs was transformed into a “Hookah Lounge”.

A hookah is a water pipe with a mixture of flavored tobacco, spices and molasses that is heated-burned and the light smoke is drawn through a water bottle. I do not smoke but my one puff was like putting my face in a flavored vaporizer. You can choose from many different flavors of mixture to smoke. A bowl of mixture takes about 30 minutes to finish and you can use two hoses with each pipe. The experience is one of relaxation, chit-chat and socializing. The smoke mixture is not over-powering to non-smokers. The upstairs has a separate ventilation system as required by law.

The Hookah Lounge was the business turn-around for the place and my walk-around magic is a part of the overall atmosphere. My magic seems to blend with the exotic feeling of Near-Eastern water-pipes and the land of Ali Baba.

I dress in a bright red Nehru jacket with a black collarless shirt with a big jewel in the center collar button. I have tux pants and black patent leather shoes. I am the age that my hair is a mixture of black and gray and my physique vaguely resembles a older network TV anchorman. I have enough maturity so that my risqué funny lines seem a bit out of place for me. I hate to think it but it may be similar to George Burns’ lines about women.

I usually begin my introduction with, “The boss pays me weekly- very weakly” (I am sure you get the pun). “Hold all ruminations and remunerations until the end when you genuinely feel sorry for me.” I am sure you can see that I am setting up the idea that they need to tip me.

“I am a magician and people always say that a magician “magishes”. I am also a wizard and people always say that a wizard…uh, you get the idea. Well, at my age I don’t do that easily anymore. You young guys, uh, ask your old man.”

I really play to the young women (18-30). If they are into it, they are far more open and animated and easy to work with. I am not flirty or a dirty old man. I am more like an old friendly and helpful Geni who says what they are thinking. “Hey, you alone? See any nice hunks here? Why isn’t that guy over there coming over and flirting with you? Want me to go get him?” “ Why are all you ladies sitting here without guys? There’s got to be a few guys here you like?” “Hey, you are a cute one, I have to find a guy here for you.” “I like your name, with a name like that you have to be a guy magnet.” I make comments like, “Ha! My youngest daughter is twice your age, I know what you are going through”.

It took me a short while to figure out how to prompt tips and work the couches.

I carry a box about the size of a shoe box and in it are about 10 tricks. In one performance set, I have a 50 cent piece on an elastic sleeve pull, a “Squash” Vanishing Whiskey Glass on a belt pull. In my pocket is a ready Brass Bill Tube and my jacket pocket has a man’s white handkerchief with a bill gimmick sewn in the corner. In my right jacket pocket is Professor’s Nightmare (my routine is a lot more involved than the standard routine with a bit of Tabary) and a Jardin Ellis Ring and in my left pocket are four one inch red sponge balls and a color changing pocket knife.

In the box, for this performance set, I have: Color Vision (yes it is hoary but no one ever knows it!) Lethal Tender, Block and Rope, Jerry Andus’ Disc (I use that to rotate on a table to make them see their flesh bubbling) a deck of cards, dye tube with red and blue silk, Malini Egg Bag Danny Tong routine), a thumb tip with a ribbon silk in it, the rope for “Hang ‘em High” (through the body) and a Chop Cup. You may be getting the idea that almost everything I do can be examined!

I have 3 separate presentations with other materials that I rotate. I also have a clear plastic tip jar with a sign on it that says “Thanks!” It always has 5 or 6 one dollar bills in it. The back of my close-up mat (made from a 12 by 15 inch piece of black marine boat carpet) has the ragged side of an old brown shopping bag glued on it. It has Magic Marker scribble writing in a kid’s backward “s” that says “Will do tricks for food”. On ribbons one-by-one I can drop two small plaques that say, “Accepting” and then “Master Card-Visa-American Express”. This was a Daniel Garcia idea. It gets a big laugh and sets up the idea that I am not there for free.

I do not do the “One dollar to hundred dollar bill trick”. They might think that if I can do that, why am I working in the Lounge.

Using a dollar bill for the Bill Tube, which I usually do as a finale for the set, gets them used to handing me money. Almost always when they open the bill after being found in the tube they just hand it to me and say, “Here keep it, that was great!” I then take that bill and do the impromptu Bill Tear where you tear the face out of the bill and it restores. This is a powerful effect and gives me an excuse for not returning the damaged bill!

I have become a part of the total overall atmosphere of the Lounge and when I arrive many of the regulars cheer and ask me to come over and entertain their friends who have never seen me.

One final note on the Lounge: The waiters, who are all brothers in the family-owned business, work to encourage tips for me. They will often give a spiel at a table of people with words like, “You will like the magician and if you have fun, remember he takes tips.” They also bring over bills and put them into my jar. Customers give them change as they are checking out and ask them to put it in my jar. The waiters watch where I am in my act and visibly come over and put the bills in my jar. They work with me on encouraging tips because I am such a vital part of the package.

Hey… have you noticed that there is an insidious belief that the right “trick” will make us! “Man, if we could just make the Statue of Liberty disappear!”, “If I just had a hook like Marvyn Roy did with the light bulbs” , “All I need is something like a floating violin and I would be in!”

Magicians think “tricks”. They do not think style, entertainment and marketability. Example: I could do the color-changing plate of spaghetti trick. You know, from red to blue to green to chartreuse and then total black. Amazing! But, who the heck cares?

I just have gone through dubbing 23 HOURS of VHS magic tapes to DVD! They are entirely on cards!

Who the heck cares! I have 4 tapes on The Pass! Watching them was like ingesting morphine. The demonstrator was skilled but why do I need to be able to do this? I can fool the britches off of everyone with a Svengali deck.

Our radio station consultant had meetings with the staff…in a private meeting with the news staff he insisted that I show him a magic trick. I did the torn and restored bill, impromptu…with all my lines! As I was eating the torn part, I said, “Everyone always asks me if I know where this bill has been. They asked that about Clinton too!” I used a few other lines. He thoroughly enjoyed my nonsense. He said, “You have done that a lot!”

THAT is what most magicians are missing. You can take an Egg Bag and entertain the heck out of people.

John Carney, Danny Tong have done it.

My favorite line is from Jim Green, the owner of “Mr. G’s Magic Shop, Orange Park, FL”. He would be restocking his shelves with MAK or imports from India and say, “the paint job will sell this baby!” We are all suckers for the paint job, both visible or in the catalog description. We often forget that we are not showing off paintjobs, we are entertaining!

Have you ever seen Victor Borge on You-Tube? Now HE'S the perfect example of what I am talking about: His piano playing takes a distant back seat to his skill at ENTERTAINING. His closing lines were: "Ladies and gentlemen, I want to take this opportunity to thank my mother for making this evening possible. ...And I'd like to thank my children for making it necessary!" and finally, "Let me just caution you all, when you drive home tonight, DO drive very carefully. Because I walk in my sleep!" All the while his hands are in "auto mode" playing some gentle but complex Frederick Chopin, the skill imbedded in his very nervous system like dinosaur bones in rock.

... Which brings up the point: Sleight of hand, no matter how difficult, should be in the background of the performance. If a magic fanatic notices himself, that he's doing a pass, he's dead in the water from the get-go. ... A good performer does the pull-through shuffle or any other difficult false shuffle so perfectly, so off-handedly, that try as he might, he finds a NORMAL riffle shuffle takes more of his attention to pull off than the sleight! That's what practice does. He over-learns it, so he is free to project his personality and communicate directly to the audience. Let the brain and hands do the work, the mind has more important things to do: misdirecting the audience with sparkling one-liners and general conviviality! Many of today's youth are addicted to fancy flourishes (heavily promoted by the dealers pushing the “Street Magic” mentality), a kind of perverse juggling with cards that says "Look what I can do!" instead of "Would you like to see miracle of the secular kind?" Put the stupid cards away and be a real human being for a change and not just a juggler of the cardboard.

Larry Thornton, my Canadian friend, talked about many years ago he was at a convention and given a startling bit of news. Okay, he was young back then.

And old-timer said that the impeccable magician Richard Ross won the coveted, world-class, first-place Grand Prix of magic at FISM, with his 4-ring Linking Ring routine. He was heralded as the "champion of champions" in magic. In short, he had supposedly reached the very pinnacle of his craft and art, and not unlike a young, owl-eyed, vacant-faced Lance Burton with his classic dove and cards act.

Then Richard Ross, the Swedish darling of conjuring, went galloping triumphantly back to his small town in his country, ready to "take on the world" -- and nearly starved to death trying to make a full-time living out of magic. He couldn't do it!

The moral of the tale: There are two worlds in the lives of nearly all magicians: The magic world (of make-believe) and the real world. In the real world, where most people don't give a flying thumb-tip about magic, you have to be drop-dead sensational to make it as a magician, or more importantly, so eclectically entertaining (think: Paul Daniels) that if you had to give up magic tomorrow, the next day you could still find work in some capacity as a general entertainer. How many magicians can make that claim? One in a million, I say. At one point, Daniels hosted a TV game show in England and delighted home audiences without doing a single trick.

As for Lance Burton, he knows how to hold 'em, and when to fold 'em: He says he's now going to pack it all in, retire, and go home and go fishing. -- And I'm willing to bet he wasn't joking. Any magic he'd do from here on in (he's not the type to tour with a giant show a la Copperfield) after being at the top in Las Vegas, could only be downhill from there. When you've hit the jackpot, there's no sense in running around afterwards picking up nickels and dimes..... every entertainer needs to know when to go gracefully into the night.

Keep cool in Florida.

It is as warm as I want to be here in Virginia.

Dennis Phillips