The magical blog of Steven Gabriel Warburton

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...

  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...

 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...

August is usually a busy month for me. This month, I had two county fairs, the Williamstown Fair and the Chesterville Fair, both in Eastern Ontario. I have been a mainstay of the Williamstown Fair for close to two decades now but the Chesterville Fair is a more recent addition. It's not as big as the fair in Williamstown - there's no mechanical midway, for instance - and I don't think they get as many people through the gates. However, the Chesterville Fair does have a demolition derby, which is a mainstay of many a county fair - and something that, to my recollection, has never been offered in Williamstown. In Williamstown, I usually do a show at the centre stage, which is a permanent structure at the Williamstown Fairgrounds. I don't think it's used much more than once a year. In Chesterville, I do my shows in the kids' tent, which is a portable canopy that the fair board puts up during fair time. This year, they told me that they got a bigger tent so they cou...

 ...has been a good one, magically speaking. January is usually the toughest month of the year for magicians. The Christmas rush is over, no one is booking corporate shows, and most people don't want to go out in the cold to watch magic shows anyway. Of course there are exceptions. I am a January baby and I always like to celebrate my birthday by doing a charity magic show. This year, we chose a local autism charity (my son is on the spectrum) and I am so happy that so many people in the small town where I live braved the frosty temperatures to come out and see some illusions. And how happy I was that the Fraternité donated the money I paid to rent their hall right back to the charity.  About the only bad thing that happened that night was that I severely over-estimated how much birthday cake I would need to feed the masses. I ordered a FULL SLAB from the grocery store when a quarter slab would have absolutely been big enough. No matter. The family and my workmates got to feas...

  I just wrapped up yet another weekend in Calgary. It ended with my sister, brother and me attending a Weird Al Yankovic concert at the Jack Singer Hall on the evening of July 6. It was the third time seeing Weird Al in concert and this show was markedly different than the other two times I saw him - Calgary in 1996 and Ottawa in August of 2007. Those shows featured plenty of theatrics, clips from his movie UHF and televised faux interviews with other famous musicians, and a cornucopia of costume changes. At one point in the Calgary show, Al cavorted around the stage with one ankle behind his neck. But this most recent show was a more stripped down affair. It was just Al and his band onstage, sitting down for the entire performance. No parodies either. Not an Eat it or a Fat or an Amish Paradise to be heard. This show focused on his original material, songs that were style pastiches rather than direct parodies. There was lots of material from in 1984 offering, In 3D,...

This past Saturday afternoon, I was relaxing at a local playground/splash pad with my son when I received a somewhat panicked text message from a fellow magician friend in Ottawa. He had a strolling magic gig that night that he couldn't attend and was desperate to find a replacement. I volunteered happily. Now this created a mild panic for me because I knew that, in about four hours time, I was expected to be dressed to the nines and doing card tricks in an Italian restaurant 150 km away. Quite frankly, I looked like a slob that afternoon in the playground. I hadn't shaved in a week, my hair was a nightmare, and my sinuses' ongoing love affair with hay fever season was threatening to derail the whole thing. But hey, I'm an optimist. I brought my son home, had a quick shower and shave, and then came to a frightening realization – I hadn't done a strolling magic show in three years.  Ever since COVID started, all my shows have been stage shows. There was, for the most...