How I spent the Victoria Day weekend

 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 Ortiz once pointed out that short sleeves are a great way to make your magic stronger.)

The rain hammered my car as I drove to my first Saturday show, which was slated for 12 noon at the Rideau Acres campground near Kingston. I thought that show would get rained out and then I met the guy who hired me, Greg S, who told me that the show would be inside the campground’s rec hall.

And what a hall it was. Seriously, it looked like a banquet hall. There was a bar, an upper level, a storage room, and the whole thing looked ultra modern. It was one of the nicest halls in which I’ve ever performed.

From there, I moved on to the KOA Ivy Lea. The sky was still grey and overcast, totally threatening rain, and the staff and I deliberated over whether I should perform outside by the pool (their original intention) or whether they should move me inside into the smaller rec hall. Eventually, someone looked at the weather forecast and saw thunderstorms were likely just around the time I was supposed to start. Ergo, I did the show inside and the room was packed and it was a fun time indeed. Afterwards, some of the kids wanted a picture, which I reproduce below.

 

I drove back home Saturday night and got ready to leave early the next morning because my first show was at 12 noon at the Opeongo resort, which was about 2.5 hours away. I always like to show up at a venue at least an hour before showtime. That hour gives me enough time to set up my show, double check all my props, set up the sound system and make sure there’s enough power in my mic. Confession: Sometimes, I enjoy the show setup more than I enjoy the show itself. I wonder if I’m alone in this. (Striking the show is my least favourite thing.)

It was my second time at Opeongo. The last time I was there was about six years ago. The resort is owned by a German couple. The wife’s name is Katja, who is largely absent now. Some of the staff told me that she is studying to be a French chef.

Opeongo doesn’t have a rec hall but they do have a big porch on the back of one of the buildings. That porch served as my stage and the audience sat on the grass.

It rained. Not hard. But it rained. Misted, actually, would be a better word. I would look out at my audience and it looked like they were sitting behind a thin shimmering curtain. No one complained, but I daresay the audience would have been larger if Mother Nature was nicer to East Ontario magicians.

Oh, but the best thing about that show was that my son went with me. My son is 12 and autistic. He’s gone to my shows before and he didn’t cooperate. Sometimes, he would get onstage with me and refuse to leave my side. Other times, he would pull my shirt up in front of my audience and expose my belly. I always made a joke about this. “The appearing belly button trick, ladies and gentlemen. Madonna perfected it before I did.”

But hey, kiddo is 12 now and he’s a good listener and when he has a fully charged iPad, a wifi connection, and his Bluetooth noise-cancelling headphones, you can pretty much tell him to do anything. I sat him in the front row, plugged him in, and told him not to move until the show was over. “Kay,” he said. I thought he would just kind of disappear into his own world, but he did not. The iPad was forgotten on his lap. He watched his old man perform. And later, when one of the campground ladies wanted to get a picture of me with one of my magic props, kiddo got in the picture with me.

I had two more shows on Sunday but kiddo didn’t see any of them. His sister rescued him before my 4 p.m. show, whisked him away for a pizza dinner and let me do my last two shows in peace. The final show of the weekend was at a place called Yonder Hill Campground.

I was skeptical going in there and so was the campground owner. We both knew that game 7 of the Toronto-Maple Leafs-Florida Panthers series would be taking place at the same time as my show. The weather was chilly, the temperature hovering around 5 degrees, and both of us wondered if anyone would trek down to the outdoor pavilion to watch an unknown magician make playing cards disappear.

But they came. They bundled up, but they came. And my friends, let me tell you that it was one of the best campground shows I have ever done. All my jokes were landing, all my tricks went off well, and I had a dynamite rapport with my audience. I do believe that if I didn’t have a son and daughter waiting for me at the motel, I could have spent the whole night there just chilling with those folks. The campground owner was no longer jaded. He was enthusiastic and telling me he’d love to have me back later in the summer. I hope I can go back. Like I said, it was fun.

As for the shows, I was excited about two of the tricks in particular.

One of them is Quarte, a slate prediction invented by the French magician, Gaetan Bloom. The idea is that you make a prediction on the bottom of the slate, you cover that prediction up with a cloth, and then you have an audience volunteer choose a four digit number. After that’s done, the cloth is removed and the prediction shown to be correct.

I realize that the description does not sound sexy (magic effect descriptions only sound sexy to magicians.) I am grateful to my friend and mentor, Paul Alberstat, who recommended I use Quarte as a through-line in the show. Introduce the slate at the beginning, have four single digit numbers chosen by four different audience members throughout the show, and the climax comes when you rip away the cloth and show that the prediction matches. I’m glad I listened. My audiences liked it; I employed a time travel motif to get the audience invested emotionally.

The other effect: Got it covered, shown in the second picture. That is a card stab effect where you have three cards chosen and then the whole deck is thrown in the air. The magician thrusts an umbrella into the cascading cards and finds two cards impaled on it. Those cards match two of the chosen cards. Upon opening the umbrella, the third card’s identity is seen printed on the fabric.

I haven’t done Got it covered in at least 15 years. I found it in my closet while moving, did a repair job on it, and made it the finale of all five shows. Great effect, even though one boo boy said “you’re gonna get bad luck for that” because that was an indoor show and, of course, you’re not supposed to open an umbrella inside.

That boo boy, by the way, was the worst thing about the weekend. A boo boy is a boy who is determined not to be impressed. They are usually young (between the ages of 12 and 15) and not particularly good at anything except video games and other pursuits that have no value in the real world. The boo boy was at my fourth show and he kept yelling out “boo” every time I finished a magic trick. At one point, a girl behind him told him that if he thought he could do better, then maybe he should so some magic tricks after I was done. That shut him up.

Thank you, girl, whoever you are.

 

An earlier picture of my son sitting onstage, conveniently located at "the educational angle."