I’ve started to practice my magic a bit more this year. And, seeing as how I can’t dance for the next couple of weeks, I can at least perform magic for my friends at the dancing studio in between their own dancing. Magic is, after all, my first love. Giving up dancing would be hard but I’d do it if I had to. Giving up magic… quite impossible.
So, I thought I’d go through my Top 5 Moments of Magic in my performing career. These are the reasons I keep at it, why I keep performing. I’ll tell you the good points of the performance and why it stands out in my mind.
It’s hard to narrow it down to only 5 moments, particularly when I currently have 3 in mind that are definitely in the top 5. However, for my first big moment, I’m going to tell a story about the time I did a show way back in 1997 (or maybe 1998, I can’t remember anymore).
Oakbank, Manitoba, 1998
It was near Christmas time, and the youth group I was a part of at the time was asked to put on a magic show for their Christmas party. I agreed to do it. At the time, I had only been performing magic for 4 years but I hadn’t really done a lot of shows. My skills were mostly in close up magic. In addition, I was more used to performing for people I knew. You see, if you know people, they are more likely to cut you some slack when you screw up and I just felt more comfortable performing that way. I got nervous enough doing a show, but doing it for strangers? Ergh.
I figured that the people going to the Christmas party would all be people I mostly knew. However, the day of the performance, I went there and while there were some people I knew, they were mostly strangers or people that I knew of but by no means would I have considered us friends. We were barely even acquaintances.
That made me really nervous. I was going to have to perform for strangers. My stomach started to get full of butterflies but I had no choice; the show had to go on. I really don’t know what tricks I did that day other than the Linking Rings (which I had a friend make for me in shop class), but when all was said and done, it came off pretty well. Even the trick that went wrong went well! For my opener, I had a couple of audience members select two cards and replace them into the deck. I tossed a deck of cards into the air, intending to pluck two of them out of the spinning deck and catch the rest of them in my other hand. Well, I did toss them into the air and pluck out the two cards… but the rest of the deck went spinning out into the audience! "Oh, crap!" I thought. It was supposed to go straight up, not up and forward!
However, as it turns out, the deck went flying into the audience and one of the girls sitting at a table leaned forward and caught it. "Whew", I thought. The deck didn’t go splattering everywhere. Even better, all the cards stayed in perfect alignment. I went down into the audience and collected the deck, then showed that the only two cards in my other hand were the two that the audience members had placed there earlier! Success! Everyone thought that was the way the trick was supposed to happen! At least, that’s what I think they thought…
So, I finished up the show and afterwards a guy I didn’t know very well came up to me and shook my hand. That meant a lot to me because I had gotten used to praise from friends and family but not people I didn’t know. I think that this was the show that started my performance transition; when I first started performing I preferred doing it for people I knew. Now, it’s completely the opposite, I much prefer performing for strangers or other people who have either never seen me perform or have seen me only rarely.
But this memory (particularly the handshake and the girl catching the deck and preventing a possible catastrophe) is one that sticks out for me and will remain with me for some time to come.