Dave’s Midlife Blog

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.