2011-09 Dennis' Deliberations

Good authors too who once knew better words, 
Now only use four letter words 
Writing prose, Anything Goes. 

The world has gone mad today 
And good's bad today, 
And black's white today, 
And day's night today,

From the song “Anything Goes” -Cole Porter

I heard about the filthy stuff out of Ed Alonzo on stage at the Dallas IBM Convention. I just can’t relate to modern magic with its bizarre cravings, grunge look and grunge words. Alonzo was always a creepy, ego maniac with an annoying stage presence. Yes, he has a few cute things but he does not wear well on stage. He seems insulting to people’s intelligence and very smart-mouthed. Not caustic, just a snotty wise-guy.  Who needs that?  I don’t need any of these so-called modern magicians. It is a shame that Lance Burton, Rick Thomas, David Seebach, Dan Stapleton, Bev Bergeron and performers with that approach are not the faces of modern magic. Even Copperfield drifted into cheese (sniffing girl’s panties on stage-remember that bizarre trick?). That was after he parted ways with the classy Don Wayne and linked with the un-classy Chris Kenner.  Copperfield may have seen the light and reformed. The details are below!

The last major magic series on TV here in the USA was the Masked Creep with his 6 trashy women exposing illusions. (Uhhh... Thank you FOX-TV and the never classy Rupert Murdoch) We are one messed up culture when it comes to business and the arts!   Maybe that will change for the magic business...

I just got word from one of Copperfield’s insiders that he is planning a touring “comeback” ina year or two and it will include a new TV special.  So far, I was told that it will be flavored as a kind of a nostalgic return to his old fans and the creation of new fans.   He may have a new hairstyle, mellow and lite approach and lots of interactive stuff.  This seems a bit poetic now that the 54 year old David has revealed that he has a 10 month old daughter by model girlfriend Chloe Gosselin, 26 years old.   One of the new Copperfield illusions could be to magically rearrange cars in the parking lot of the show..(Based on an idea from Luis DeMatos)  Copperfield will use TV screens. Will the Golden Age return?

For the past 75 years on a few days around the first of August, a bucolic village in southwest Michigan holds a magic celebration. It is sponsored by the Abbott Magic Company and the town in Colon, Michigan.  Almost all magicians know about Abbotts. Colon was the summer home of Harry Blackstone Sr. and he went into business with Australian immigrant Percy Abbott and created a company to produce magic and illusions. Harry and Percy dissolved their partnership in a low-key personality clash and the business was not enough for Harry to quit touring.

Recil Bordner bought into Percy's operation and after Percy died in 1960, the Bordner  Family became the sole owners. Recil's son, Greg, is the owner today. Abbotts always was a small family business that employed a number of people in Colon.  In the early 50s one of their flash pots was improperly used at a dance recital and a young girl was burned. They were almost sued into bankruptcy.  They have had fires and thin times and a few good years. Greg is living with a transplanted heart and may beat the disease that killed his father. Greg's brother became a Geology Professor at a university in nearby Kalamazoo.    

This year there were about 300 that attended the event. They have had triple that in the past. But it is always like a family reunion.  My first Get Together was in 1969 and I met up with a yet-to-be famous Doug Henning and talked with Jack Gwynne. I sat next to Jay and Francis Marshall on the Friday Night Show.  I again visited in 1989.I sat next to Paul Daniels and Debbie MacGee and had a long chat with Harry Blackstone Jr. who I knew from his days in Florida working for Tupperware.

Colon is a town were time almost stands still but changes I saw in the town were a metaphor of the industrial decline of our country and the changing form of show business.   Abbotts is an American Classic and I was happy that Dan Stapleton, my long time Orlando friend, was able to perform in the show and do his fabulous blindfold stunt. I hope that future generations of magicians will have an Abbotts catalog and Get Together.  It always was the stuff of dreams.  

Larry Thornton and I shared similar experiences at summer family reunions this summer:   While on a family re-union on my wife's side, I was asked to do some magic. You know, the relatives believe that as a magician and therefore one of the true "freaks" of the clan, you must feel privileged to become their "performing monkey" whenever you all get together.  I reluctantly packed my cards, ropes, silks and Hippity Hop Rabbits and a few other bits of stuff. The wife insisted! -- "Dolly will be SO-O-O disappointed if you don't do some magic!"  I had the faint hope that they'd eventually forget about asking me to "dance for my supper", but I was wrong.  The odd thing is, they kept asking me at the re-union if I'd do some magic later "before it gets dark out", and I agreed to do some, but the host got busy on the appointed evening and forgot to introduce me.  So I thought, gee, I'd better do something, so I went around to the folks and showed them some impromptu table magic. 

An observation (1 of 3):

Have you noticed, when you're busy doing your very best card tricks, stuff you spent half-a-lifetime to collect and to master, that one of the attention-deprived uncles soon decides to show YOU his one-and-only card trick, and he has to use your cards for it!  ...He is not a magician, he doesn't know diddly-squat about magic, and he doesn't seem to notice in the least that everyone has just been royally flabbergasted by some of your greatest card miracles.

Metaphorically speaking, you know that you’ve just knocked yourself out *curing leprosy, walking on water, and multiplying fishes and loaves for the multitudes *.  BUT NO MATTER!! Mr. Congeniality, voted in his high school Yearbook as the guy most-likely to wear a lampshade at a party -- now has your deck in his grubby tight-fisted hands. Having no other deck of cards with you, you feel as if you just handed him your only bouquet of roses that immediately withered and died.  The dude's "big shining moment" is at hand. He now commands the stage and is about to "wow" everybody with the "Now-Tell-Me-Which-of-These Three-Rows-It's In", Wonder Card Trick of the Ages. He even adds, “Let me put the row that you card is in here in the middle of the other two”.  

Observation (2 of 3):

While performing surrounded, in order to do some of your stronger effects you elect to "sacrifice" those one or two people behind you (to some small degree) by concentrating mainly on wowing the bulk of the crowd in front of you.  Now you KNOW you're not going to exposed anything to anybody, no matter where they're standing. But then the guy behind or off to the side of you (hey, its the same dude as before!)suddenly thinks he's seen something "fishy" with your jog-shuffle or your double lift, or your oh-so-tiny "finger break", and he just CAN'T WAIT to blab it out to everyone else!  But he can't communicate exactly what he THINKS he saw.  Even so, he feels compelled jump-up-and-down excitedly over "what he saw" in the misguided attempt to make a "fool" out of the professional fooler!  You can change direction abruptly, by steering your routine in "mid flight" adroitly over to some other effect intended to KILL the very guy bent on killing YOU.  -- Or you can simply offer the cards to the rube and ask him to "finish the trick"; or "show us what you mean."  But of course, this causes him to back off, to the merriment of all; which then frees you to recover from this interruption.  

Final observation:

Then there's the situation of having repeated some of your tricks earlier for a smaller crowd (like, two or three people on the porch). But these folks are with the second larger audience later, and like or not, they've now elected themselves as your "cheering section."  They mean well, in telling everyone how great you are (in so doing, some of the "stardust" falls back on them), but the moment you start a routine that they've seen before, they get all excited and reveal the punch line to the trick!  Or its, "Hey do that one where all the aces magically appear."  Ah.... right.  ...Will do.  ...About five or six tricks from now when everyone's forgot what was just said!  

Or the distant relative who says, “Do the story of Jim, or was it Joe, no, Steve the Bellhop where all the cards tell the story!”  Oh don’t you just love it when they have seen what you do for years?   “Can do you that one where I pick a card and sign it and you rip it up and my corner matches it when you have made it all go back to whole?”

Just then the 7 year old nephew tugs on the arm and says, “Can you make a quarter come out of my ear?”   I say, “What do you think; I can really pull money out of thin air?”   He looks up with a big smile and an affirmative, “Uh-Huh!”    Family summer reunions, don’t you love them?

Dennis