I have recently been asked about my time in the 1970-80s as a professional magician. I dug around in my old VHS tapes and found this video from August 16, 1981 when I was appearing in the Close-Up Gallery at the Magic Castle for a 7 night engagement. I was pretty serious about it at the time - I worked Cruise Ships, business conventions and the like, and various LA area comedy clubs, etc. - but when I moved back to the SF Bay area in 1990, I made the decision to devote myself to my music. Magic performance is a very time consuming because in order to stay on top of your game you have to spend hours in front of a mirror every day. Otherwise it is easy to lose your edge. Also it is much harder to make any kind of impact as a magician, the opportunities are few and far between to get in front of substantial audiences, unless you go work in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, where you had to compete aganst mega-stars like Doug Hennig and David Copperfield (both of whom, by the way, were fans of mine and always stopped in to see my shows at the Castle when they were in town). This particular show was the first of three performances I gave that Saturday evening, the last night of my week long engagement. The Castle was a hangout for a lot of celebrities - earlier that week I had Karl Malden, James Franciscus, and incredibly, Muhammed Ali among my audiences. Ali (an amateur magician in his own right) kept nudging the guy next to him and exclaiming this guy is good! During this show, one of my idols, supreme prestidigitator, Dai Vernon, sat in the back row and winked at me whenever I did something he found impressive. Vernon spent most evenings at the Castle and frequently held court at the bar in the downstairs lobby, critiquing youngsters such as myself. I was priveleged to be able to consider him as a friend. By the way, this was recorded on an old fashioned video camera that had to be plugged into a VHS video recorder in order to work. They only came in black and white models in those early days of home video technology.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 08:01:39 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015