Welcome to Sault Ste. Marie

-
Last weekend, I was super pleased that I finally got the opportunity to perform at the Bonsoo, one of the greatest winter carnivals in Ontario. The Bonsoo is in Sault Ste. Marie, which is the hometown of Ron Francis, one of my favourite NHL players of all time. The Sault Ste. Marie is also home of the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds hockey team, where Wayne Gretzky played before he joined the NHL.

But enough about hockey.

The Bonsoo organizers invited me to perform three shows at the Canadian Bushplane Heritage Centre. It is one of the most amazing venues ever. As I stood onstage, I was surrounded by old vintage airplanes, many of which you could actually enter and see how pilots flew their planes more than a hundred years ago. In fact, a couple kids even confessed to sitting in one of those planes so they could watch my entire show from behind.

"We wanted to see if we could figure out how you did your tricks," one of them confessed.

"Did you?" I asked.

"No," they said.

So I guess that practice paid off.






Even better, I GOT TO MEET ANOTHER MAGICIAN!!!

This young guy named Fin showed up and he was all dressed like a classical magician - dress shirt and pants and the whole nine yards. He even had a magic wand. I'm so happy that we had a brief jam session where we got to show and teach each other a few tricks.





I hope that the Bonsoo will have me back next year and that Fin will show up again. He could probably take over that gig in another five years.

Before I left, I got my picture taken with Bonsoo, the mascot for whom the carnival is named.


Seriously, if you're ever in Sault Ste. Marie, you need to check out the museum. It's breathtaking. Here's a link: Bushplane

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How I spent the Victoria Day weekend

-
Image
 Every year, I spend the Victoria Day weekend bringing my magic show to campgrounds in East Ontario. In a good year, I can get six shows. This year, I only got five. Oh well. It gives me a bit more pocket change to get me through the spring. (Sometimes, I jokingly refer to my Victoria Day weekend shows as the Pay Last Year’s Taxes Tour.) What was different about this year’s tour? Two things: 1.        The weather. 2.        My kid came with me. I’ll take them one by one. Usually, the weather on Victoria Day weekend is at least warm, if not hot. Sometimes it will rain. Once it rained so hard that it caused power outages. It was a small miracle that none of my shows got cancelled that year. But this year, it was cold. Seriously, the temperature hovered around six degrees Celsius and I had to wear long sleeves and long pants for all my shows. (I prefer to do all my shows in short sleeves, the late great Darwin Ort...
Read more

On buying magic stuff...

-
Image
  I have this longstanding theory about magic dealers. I think they prefer dealing with "magic enthusiasts*" more than magicians. At this point, some definitions are in order. A "magic enthusiast" is NOT a professional or even a semi-professional magician. He (or she, but probably a he**) is someone who likes magic tricks and likes the air of mystique they might lend him. Perhaps he wants some magic tricks to pick up girls or entertain the grandchildren or to do a set at the company picnic. And so they go to the magic dealer for a few modestly priced easy-to-do miracles. The magic enthusiast is an easy sell. The professional magician is not. I have spent hours in magic stores, undoubtedly boring the proprietor as I searched for something that "fit my style." I reject most of the magic I see - not because I don't think it's great (for much of it is) but because it doesn't suit my personality. I think most pros (and semi-pros) are imp...
Read more

On practising magic in public

-
Image
On Wednesdays, I take my son to therapy in a nearby city. While he's there, I go to a local coffee shop where I spend about seven hours on various work or leisure projects. They include journalism (work), creative writing (leisure), and practising magic (work and leisure.) So I sit at my booth, I set up my laptop and my closeup pad, and I go to work. Today, I spent about five hours practising two routines. One of them was the four-coin routine that I recently mentioned on this blog, the other was a very colourful and visual ace assembly. I was mostly ignored, which is kind of odd when you think about it. I mean... there I was, literally making the impossible happen. I was making coins disappear and reappear somewhere else. I was making red-backed aces jump from a blue pile into another a red pile.  But no one cared. They cared more about their coffee and their donuts than they did about the guy who was defying the laws of nature in the booth next to them. And that got me thinking a...
Read more