Dave’s Midlife Blog

I didn’t drive into DC each and every day since I last wrote of my plans to undertake street performing; but I did go in a few more times. I figured out that the National Mall is a terrible place to do magic, because nobody expects to see you there. When people make public statements in the Monumental Core of the District of Columbia, they are generally aggrieved about some political question. That’s the kind of soapbox speaker you expect to see there–not a street magician.

I tried to move into the downtown area of the city one day, and set up my rig in a nice, shady spot at Freedom Plaza (13th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue), but didn’t really get anything going there.

After about a week off or so, I got a call from my magician friend Brian. He was calling about a restaurant gig. When I asked him what he had been up to, he said he’d been working on the street. Wow! I told him that was exactly what I’d been working on. Brian told that he usually works at the waterfront in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, where there are a lot of buskers of several types. He mentioned two other names, magician acquaintances of mine, who also worked there. Brian said that since he would be out of town for awhile, I ought to feel free to come on down.

(Brian also mentioned that the great Bob Sheets, the dean of bar magicians and a real star in the Washington area magic scene, is also working on the street. This tells me two things: everybody seems to be doing it; and I may not be magically worthy to continue. But anyway…)

This past Saturday I got my stuff together and drove down to Alexandria, where I set up at about noon. It was a hotter day than I expected. I worked for a couple hours, but it was such a hot day that I couldn’t keep a crowd. As I was leaving to go to the car, a balloon twister told me I was there too early; that I should try again at the dinner hour.

Well, I didn’t go back during the Saturday dinner hour, but I did go to the wharf yesterday, Monday evening, and worked from about 7:00 until 8:00 PM.

Miraculously, it worked.

The weather was pleasant, there was a steady stream of foot traffic (not a lot, but enough), and I tried a new bally (the kind of “step-right-up” speech carnival barkers use) to gather a crowd. Within the hour I worked, I performed a three-routine show four times.

I made $17 in the hat. That’s not great money, but that was on a Monday night in mid-August. Moreover, I drew and held rather small crowds. Here’s the wonderful part: when I did my “hat speech,” asking for money, just about all the adults went for their wallets. That is, my percentage of positive response to the hat speech was very high.

I have much to learn still, but I now know I can do this. I’m ready to get back on that horse and ride some more!

I started trying to perform street magic in Washington, DC this week.

By “street magic,” I don’t mean the kind of close-up magic David Blaine made really popular nine years ago, when he took a TV crew onto the street and filmed people’s reactions to card and coin tricks.

I mean real street magic, the kind where you do a stage show, basically, and draw a crowd, and near the end of it you do a pitch for money. The kind of street magic that has been performed for hundreds of years in Europe and the US. The loud, public kind.

I spent the last several weeks building a new performing table and building a new act (mostly routines I had done in other venues, but closing with a very strong cups-and-balls routine, Gazzo’s variation of the Dai Vernon routine). I rehearsed on video and with my in-house magical consultant, and felt that I had a reasonably strong show.

On Monday of this week, I drove into DC and headed for Dupont Circle. The neighborhood around Dupont is rather intellectual, upscale, and artsy. But I arrived at the tail-end of the lunch hour on a miserably hot day, and nobody was interested at all. After a couple hours of frustration, not having any success in attracting even a single person, I went down to the National Mall, by the Smithsonian Museums.

After driving around a bit, I got a parking spot within walking distance of the museums. I set up my rig under a tree at the Mall entrance to the Museum of Natural History. Once again, it was miserably hot, and people were tired and hungry at 2:00 PM. A couple of people stopped, and I did begin to understand the dynamic of crowd-building: capture the attention of one or two people, and six or seven others will come over to see what’s up.

But the group whose attention I got were on their way to find some food, so they left rather quickly, as soon as I turned my attention to new additions to the group. And that group hung around for two tricks, and then that was it.

Next day I picked a better spot, at the crossing to the Washington Monument, and tried a new “traffic-stopping” gimmick: a card-finding robot toy. This actually worked, somewhat: I was able to stop several people, and actually build enough of a “crowd” (maybe 10-12 people) to do most of my full-out show. But the crowd fizzled before the climax. At the end of the cups and balls trick, only two young guys were still there. They were delighted and baffled, but they were alone.

So on Tuesday I gathered a crowd of a dozen, and made one dollar.

Wednesday (yesterday) I went to the same spot on the Mall and set up, but this time was unable to stop anybody at all in two hours. I got the distinct sense that people were quite afraid to talk to me. Frustrated, I packed my hand-truck and walked off the Mall and into downtown. And instantly I realized something important.

Location is probably 90% of your success in this biz. The second I got onto the “downtown” side of the museums, the feeling was different. People were not there to make family pilgrimages to the shrines of American democracy, but rather to find a place to eat, check out the sites, buy a souvenir.

Sitting out here in the suburbs, it is very easy to go to books and tricks in my magic library and see whether I can come up with the “one trick” that will cause me to have success. I will not, of course. My problem has nothing to do with the tricks. I have a strong professional repertoire of magic that has made me much money over the past ten years.

It’s about developing enough balls, enough brass, to convince a complete stranger on the street to stop and pay attention to me for five minutes. After I’ve done that, it’s about having the non-stop energy and direct, personal engagement with this growing crowd of strangers to convince them all to stay for another 20 minutes. And then eventually to give up a couple bucks apiece.

That’s the scary part. That’s really the tallest of tall orders. Not the magic.

My wife asks me why I’m doing this, and I tell her, “I’m going to school.” I want to do this until I get it somewhat right. When I perform it’s always for somebody who has called me on the phone and contracted with me to perform for their party. If I learn how to do the street, I won’t have to wait for that call.

It’s raining today, but tomorrow (Friday) I’m going to back into town and go into town this time. It’s a bit scarier: Are the police going to run me off? Are people going to regard me as demented? Will my traffic-stopper work downtown?

Ultimately, I think, I’m doing this to confront my own fears.

It’s August 10, and in a lot of ways my summer has not even started. I have projects that I will be killing myself to complete before I go back on the job as a teacher in a couple weeks.

But a lot of things did get rolling, at least. I finally got a good start on the very large book translation project I’m doing on Johann Nepomuk Hofzinser (Viennese conjuror from the early 19th century, an important influence in card magic).

Moreover, having rehearsed and practiced for several weeks, I finally started driving into DC this week to (attempt to) perform street magic. (I had very limited success with this, but the project is not over. I’ll write more about this later.)

Baseball has been a passion. I think at this point I have probably attended at least 17 Washington Nationals games, not all at RFK. I have gone to all the games (except two) in my mini-plan season ticket, plus three walk-up tickets for RFK and a gift ticket for Oriole Park in Baltimore. I’m delighted to note that my wife is almost as into this as I am.

Although I have been performing professionally about as much as I usually do in the summer, I very gladly have once again embraced magic and conjuring as a field of study, rather than a mere source of income in which I do my comfortable act. I haven’t introduced five new routines to my public performance repertoire, but I have introduced one (Gazzo’s cups and balls), as well as a new method (same presentation) for torn-and-restored newspaper.

Sorry it’s been over two months since I’ve been here. But hey, you know, I’ve been busy!