Coming Home After Too Many Years Away From The Stage
I gave my last magic performance probably around 2003, and the last one for a paying audience probably 15 years before that. Then I did a few community theatre plays and that was it. Over the years I’d thought I should get “back in the saddle” again, but it never took. Finally…
…after watching the documentary “Muppet Guys Talking” I felt horribly homesick. And almost physically sick because I knew I took a wrong turn so many years ago when I gave up performing.
The other thing that got me focusing on performing again was cancer. I’ve had three surgeries in the last three years and when something like that happens it makes you think really hard. There are things in my life I regret doing, and I can’t fix those. But there are other things I regret not doing, and I’m working on fixing those now, with whatever time I have left. Getting back into performing is one of those things.
Getting Started (Again)
We’d just moved from Alaska to Arizona (thanks, 7.1 earthquake that convinced me to leave Alaska!) and I found myself in a location with plenty of places to perform, and started working more seriously on some mentalism routines. I’d decided to make the switch from magic to mentalism over the preceding few years while I poked at getting back into performing, and it continues to feel like the right path for me.
Just about the time I was going to try and get my foot back in the door, Covid reared up and the whole world ground to a halt for a couple years. Grrr…
Finally it was over enough that open-mics started up again and I decided to use those venues to shake the rust off my performing chops. There was a lot of rust!
But it was also a lot of fun and helped me start honing my act. And several months later, the local magic clubs were ready to restart holding in-person meetings, so that gave me two more times per month to test things. After so many years away, it was great fun to get back in front of people and entertain!
At one of those magic club meetings in the spring of 2023 I performed a crazy routine that I ended up calling Specimen Roulette. I got some good feedback on it that night and thought even if it was, admittedly, a weird effect, it probably had legs.
So I kept tweaking it, tightening it up in spots, finding better items for the necessary props. And then the end of June, lightning struck. The good kind of lightning. My magician friend Tank, who had seen the original performance, asked if I’d like to perform it during four shows he had coming up at the Desert Stages Theatre. Yes!
Enter The Shakes
I did a bit of close-up stuff back in the olden days, but ever since my teens I’ve had a tremor in my hands and when you combine that with the typical adrenaline spike of performing, I looked like a 90-year old doing card tricks while I was in my early 20s. (Not that all 90-year olds have trembling hands, please don’t shake your cane at me. I can say that, because as a 60-year old with balance issues, I use a cane!) That’s one of the reasons I stopped doing close-up.
But my natural shakiness (which has gotten worse as I’ve aged), along with the “You’re on stage!”adrenaline spike, multiplied by the first time on stage in YEARS, had me shaking so badly I was glad to be 20 feet from the nearest row of seats. The poor guy who volunteered to help me on stage probably thought I was going to keel over. Halfway through I realized my freaking legs were even shaking! I got through the piece and people laughed and applauded in the right spots, so I knew it was all good, but if you had strapped a jar of cream to me I’d have given you butter after the set.
The next night, the second of four performances, was a sold-out show so there was a lot more laughter and audience feedback. It went better, in that I was less shaky (still a bit shaky, but noticeably less for me), but also went worse because I forgot to show the audience something that comes back around at the end. Without that part, when the climax came they had to put the pieces together in their minds on the fly. It still “worked” but I put some guardrails in place to make sure I wouldn’t forget that part again.
Tank’s friend Elisha showed me a couple breathing exercises to do before going on stage and it’s quite likely the combination of those and just getting back in the groove helped my shaking ease way the heck off the next weekend, and both of those sets went very well.
Lessons Learned
Well, the obvious lesson learned is that when you’re a performer, don’t stop performing!
Another thing is to keep experimenting. I delivered a line I’ve used maybe a dozen times (counting open-mics) just a little bit differently and got a much better laugh from it. And it brought home how *nothing* can take the place of performing in front of an audience to get a presentation right. You can practice it in your living room, video record it and watch back, tweak the script a little here and a little there — but nothing says “that’s it!” better than the reaction of an audience.
I recorded my sets and watched them back to critique myself before the next performance. After the first weekend I noticed some dead time near the end of the routine and decided I needed to change the ending. I ran the idea past a few friends that I brainstorm with, and all of them said it was probably worth testing. That week I practiced the new ending and as soon as I performed it I knew — it just felt better. Watching the routine later showed me I wasn’t imagining it, and that’s the new ending to the routine from now on. (Until I experiment with something else…?)
I think that lesson is called, always look for things that may not be wrong, but could be better. And if you’re not recording your act yet, start. Even turning on voice recording on your phone and dropping it in your pocket before you go on stage will be better than nothing. Well, unless you’re doing a manipulation act to music…
Final lesson — I need to find more opportunities to get on stage!
