“And what are you going to write?”
Before I could think about it, the words slipped out. “Something epic.” I felt like an idiot.
Jane smiled, like she collected dreams the way I collected Batman comics and I’d given her a new one to slip into a protective plastic cover and hide away in the box in her closet. “So you should write the showcase.”
Now Kyle chimed in. “That’s a great idea.”
Randy looked like his male ego had just been booted in the testicles.
“Yeah,” said Lisa. “Mark’s a real writer.”
Suddenly, I had a bigger crush on Lisa than Randy did. I loved the way she said, “real writer.”
Jane took her hand off mine and put it on Randy’s. “You know, Randy, if Mark writes, you can focus on the magic.”
“Yeah,” he said, picking up Jane’s thread. Then he turned to me. “You should write the script. But we’ll work together on it. And you should direct, too. That way I don’t have to worry about anything but the magic.”
Wow. Suddenly I wasn’t just involved, I was writing and directing a showcase for Rainbow Productions, a show that could tour the world. I definitely needed another beer. If I could only finish the first one. Even with the lime it tasted pretty gross.
“Can you have it ready in a month?”
This time Randy and I answered together. “No problem.”
She lifted her bottle to toast. “Just remember to build this to tour. Because if it works, it’s going everywhere.” Then she repeated the last word so we’d hear it echoing in our dreams for years, maybe forever. “Everywhere.”
7
The Dove Pan
We had a problem. We had a lot of problems. The biggest and best illusions we had were also the ones that looked the cheapest and tackiest if you got too close to the stage—and we had to assume the illustrious Brad Bowen was going to walk around our stage after the show and kick our magical tires. So the guillotine was out. We knew the Metamorphosis might work if we could borrow a nicer blanket and find a fancier helmet, but it didn’t seem fair to ask Marvin to be part of the showcase, since he was too young to tour with the show.
Randy had a few ideas for big tricks he wanted to design, but he needed money and even though we knew we could get all the money in the world once Rainbow was on board, no one had any ideas for raising funds right away. Randy tried to borrow money from his mom, but she still hadn’t forgiven him for ruining her favourite sheets.
No money, no Metamorphosis and no guillotine meant the only magic we could use to prove we could tour the world were birthday party tricks. How were we supposed to dazzle the great and powerful Brad by making sponge balls appear, conjuring cupcakes out of a “dove pan,” spinning a few scarves around, and cutting and restoring rope?
While everyone else in my grad class was trying to do silly things like graduate, I was trying to figure out how to turn a handful of party tricks that could barely impress seven-year-olds into a magic spectacular that would dazzle the most important promoter I’d ever heard of. This all sounded exciting when Jane suggested it—but now it was terrifying. Every day at school whenever I wasn’t searching for Sarah, Kyle seemed to be searching for me to ask if I’d figured out the script yet. A month? What was I thinking?
One night when I was supposed to be finishing several class projects, working on the school paper and learning my lines for the school play, I saw a used car ad on TV—or maybe it was a parody ad on Saturday Night Live—where the crazy salesman yelled at late-night viewers about how he could afford to make such impossible deals. His answer: “Volume, volume, volume.”
The next day after school I asked Randy for a list of every illusion he owned, every illusion he could afford and every illusion he could fake. Then I got him to explain which ones took skill and which ones were all about gizmos and gimmicks. A general and particularly ironic rule of magic is that the smaller the trick, the tougher it usually is to do. It takes practice, coordination and skill to make a quarter vanish and pluck it from behind someone’s ear. All it takes to make an elephant disappear is millions of quarters. If you can afford to buy the big illusions, you can do them. Most decent card tricks require weeks, months or even years of training to do well, never mind professionally. But all it takes to shoot fire is a fire-shooter, or well-placed flash pots and a guy like Norman sitting in the wings with a finger on the detonator. Once Randy and I broke down which tricks didn’t require training I gave those to Kyle and Lisa, so everyone in the act could do something magical.
Then I condensed the story to cut down on the quest. Santar and Oryon would both do a bit of summoning, conjuring weapons in tricked-out versions of the tin that makes cupcakes appear—except instead of cracking eggs in it, they’d use fire. You can never go wrong with fire.
Doug Henning might have changed the face of magic, but he hadn’t changed the pace. Most illusions Henning did were still presented with a big set-up, a flourish and a break for applause. If anyone else was doing an illusion or effect every minute, we hadn’t seen them. And, if we were lucky, neither had Brad Bowen.
Once we had the script, we rehearsed the illusions for a couple of hours every day after school for three weeks. Because there was no Metamorphosis, there was no Adoma and that meant I got to watch from the audience with cousin Jane and Brad Bowen. When Jane walked in with Bowen she looked as nervous around him as we were around her. He wasn’t a big guy, but he walked around like he was. He wore jeans and a fancy suit jacket and looked like important Hollywood people looked on TV shows.
The lights went down, then up. I watched Brad watch the showcase and his eyes were everywhere—taking in every illusion, examining studly Kyle, sexy Lisa and charming Randy.
Oryon and Santar met, monologued at each other, fired fire-shooters, flashed flash pots and, just when it looked like they were going to wreak havoc with a phenomenal Henning-level illusion … black out.
This was back when every girl in high school had a poster in her locker of a Bee Gee or a Wanna Bee Gee like Leif Garrett—who was the same age as Randy. After the set was over Brad didn’t look at us, didn’t talk to us, just stared, hands folded. We all watched, waited for … something … anything. Brad took in the onstage tableau one more time, then turned to Jane, muttered something and left without saying a word to any of us. It was obvious he hated it, until the auditorium door swung shut behind the man from Rainbow. Jane leapt to her feet, jumped on our stage and shrieked, “You’re gonna be huge.” It seemed crazy, but maybe it wasn’t.
Randy hugged Lisa, Kyle hugged them both. I looked at Norman and we didn’t hug, but we nodded to each other. It was official—we were gonna be huge.
“I can’t wait to see the script for the real show,” said Jane.
The real show …
I barely had time to wonder if I was part of it when Randy turned to me. “So I guess we’re writing that together, right, buddy?”
I was working on a real show … for Rainbow. Screw graduation. Screw university. I’d made it. I was plotting my new life plan when I heard Jane add, “And we’ve gotta come up with a plan for your tour.”
A plan … I didn’t have any idea what kind of plan Rainbow needed—none of us did—but as long as the point of the plan was fame, fortune and travelling North America with Lisa Jorgensen in skimpy costumes, we were in. After Jane left to meet Brad, the rest of us sat on the stage, basking in the residual magic.
The next night, I visited Randy’s apartment for the first time. A few months earlier Randy had found a job and moved out of his mom’s basement. He was working for the one employer in the world who would never notice or care if he came to work stoned, or occasionally called in sick to work on a magic show—the federal government. Thanks to a friend of his mother’s he’d scored a clerical job, something to do with printing Unemployment Insurance cheques.