My best friend Adrienne had told me we weren’t ready to perform in front of an audience yet. As usual, I was blind to reality and deaf to practicality. We had advertised our magic show already, with handdrawn signs on the walls of my family’s hallway and kitchen. There was no backing out now, I informed her. I’ve always felt that putting something into print, even if handwritten, was like stamping it with the word of god. Plus, even at 12 years old, I had that “show must go on!” mentality. Nevermind the fact that we’d spent all day waterskiing on my family’s crappy pea green boat, were tired and sunburned, and hadn’t had time to practice all our tricks.
The grand finale, though, we knew would be perfect. Adrienne and I had both learned each part of the multi-stepped Big Trick carefully and devoutly, like hopeful nuns and priests studying the Bible. Again and again we performed each trick individually, wowing our young classmates at the Magic 101 summer course taught by retired Magician Bob, until our finale combining all of them would be so seamless (I imagined) that even a roomful of experienced illusionists couldn’t figure it out.
Though she hadn’t seen it, my mom didn’t care much for the Big Trick. All she knew of it was that we would waste a deck of cards and an orange with each performance. It involved having a bystander choose a card, cut it up, keep the corner as a “receipt,” and end up holding a handful of ripped up papers instead, which when put together spell out “Look in the orange.” Conveniently, there is a fruit bowl located nearby. Lo and behold, rolled up inside the orange is…the original card, intact except for one missing corner, which the volunteer is still holding!
Ah yes, I was destined to be a magician, paid to perform at birthday parties and bar mitvahs. Or wherever magicians are typically hired to perform. Here I should mention that I’ve always had a tendency to get swept up in new ideas (Cutco knives anyone? The world’s finest cutlery!) and take them to the extreme. I couldn’t just take a magic class for fun, I had to create a business venture and design colorful flyers proclaiming, “Magicians for Hire! Two practiced 12-year-old magicians will liven up any party with their amazing acts…Proof of education/experience available on request.” Magician Bob, I figured, along with our incredibly impressed audience members, would vouch for us. The business was all my idea, by the way, one to which Adrienne only tentatively subscribed, and understandably.
The day of our unveiling, I could finally showcase the skills I’d developed from hours of studying diagrams in magic books and watching videos of the man I was in love with since I was 4 years old, David Copperfield. Our audience consisted of my mom, my stepdad-cum-adopted dad, and my 9-year-old sister Susheela. My sister was excited, I guess, and my mom feigned great interest, but my dad has always been—how would you say?—a total buzzkill. He had made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with my magic class (including paying for it, so I saved up my allowance and babysitting money). And now I was so determined to impress him, to make him regret that he’d declared it a total waste of time, money, and effort, that I lost all sight of reality.
You’d think that, with the show being so important to me and all, I would’ve considered postponing it until both my partner and I felt comfortable and prepared. But I insisted that Adrienne and I perform that night. The opening I made into a grand spectacle, promising mysterious illusions, white magic, black magic, and an ooh-and-ahh inspiring finale.
The first few tricks went as planned but my mom and sister-- two thirds of our audience—had already seen me perform them and were therefore unimpressed. My dad had prepared his metrosexual manicure kit and was already clipping his fingernails, which isn’t that odd considering how stubborn he is and also how much he’s incensed by having to watch anyone perform. It has something to do with his having to sit still and endure church services when he was growing up in the Bible Belt, and also the entertainment acts he and the other soldiers drafted into the Vietnam War were forced to watch. Any time he is watching a performance that he didn’t pay to see (including his kids’), he bitterly complains about being a “captive audience.” Movies, though, are a completely different story; he’ll watch anything once. In any case, I decided to let him focus on his nails as long as I could tell he was listening. Adrienne noticed this too, and I could only hope she knew my dad well enough to know not to take it personally.
Then we came to a segment we’d never performed before and in fact had only discussed maybe once. Suddenly it became clear why Adrienne was so hesitant about our show…because when I asked her to go backstage (the bathroom down the hall) while the audience chose an object in the room for her to guess, she started hitting and jimmying the door. “J.! The door’s stuck! I need help!” My dad rolled his eyes and sighed loudly, which at least signaled to me that he was still paying attention.
Trying to maintain composure like a magnificent MC should, I asked Susheela to go help my partner, so as not to give the impression that we were cheating. Of course, in my heart I knew the door wasn’t stuck, it had never gotten stuck before, and this only prolonged Adrienne’s distress and embarrassment. We all heard her talking to Susheela in the hall and she finally shouted, “J., I need to talk to you.” I left the audience hanging as I ran back there and told her how the trick worked. I returned red-faced and feeling like a failure for losing two things every magician strives for: the interest and respect of the audience.
Upon my return, my mom had the same look on her face that she does when she says one of her favorite phrases: “Ho hum, such is life.” As the softer, meeker parent, she was the one who went into hiding while my dad rampaged and shit on Susheela and me. Afterward she’d emerge with a pooper scooper and try to clean up his trail by telling us that we were good kids and we were doing just fine, contradicting everything he’d just yelled. But the look she gave me that night, it was like she was saying, “Well, I thought this could be good and I gave it a chance but…nope.”
By this time my dad had finished his manicure and had moved to his feet. It was clear that he was concentrating solely on his toenails. There was a loud clip and rustle as each nail fell into the bag in the trash can strategically positioned at his feet, between me and my audience. When I confidently asked him not to do that (Magician Bob had taught us to be authoritative with our audience), he said without looking up, “You made me a captive audience. You insisted that I be here even though you know I don’t want to be. So, no.”
Adrienne and I didn’t perform the finale. Mom didn’t want me wasting an orange and I didn’t have the goods to form a makeshift fruit bowl anyway. Plus we hadn’t had time to carefully, like a surgeon, remove the center of the orange, stuff a card inside, and glue it back on. Following the completely anti-climactic ending, I calmly walked to my bedroom at the end of the hall and bawled my eyes out. For a really long time. In front of Adrienne, even. And I didn’t even stop when my mom came to check on us and found us both sobbing.
I had never cried in front of a friend before, or my parents ever since I was old enough to stop crying for a bottle. Stuffing every emotion except excitement was my usual deal. But this, this…was disaster. This was extreme embarrassment and supreme disappointment. This was me, trying to exact respect and admiration from my parents for something other than my innate ability to test well in school, to get recognized for something I actually had to work hard at, and failing miserably.
And on a deeper level, I get that this was also me desperately wishing my dad to be the kind who encourages his daughter to make cash doing side jobs she’s excited about, not one who laughed at my magician flyers and told me not to put them up because no one, and he means no one, no matter how strapped for cash, would ever hire a kid to perform at even a baby’s party. I was trying to turn him into the dad who’s proud that I earned a musical solo part in Bye Bye Birdie, not one who boycotted all four performances because he was mad that the music teacher didn’t keep to her rehearsal schedule. I had hoped that for once he’d be like Adrienne’s dad, who one week after the Big Flop sat excitedly on his couch with her mom, brother, and sister, eagerly awaiting our amazing finale. (Her family, by the way, had all kinds of fruit for us to practice on. They seemed genuinely impressed by our show, and their assurances that we did great didn’t even end with the clause “for a 12-year-old.”)
My bookshelf still holds the Learn Magic and The Klutz Book of Magic that I pored over for so many months and inscribed with my name and phone number. Perhaps I still hope that one day, my confidence will shoot back to that level it was just before our Big Show, and that this time I’ll have the skills and experience to maintain it. Maybe Adrienne will fly out to San Diego, spot our old props, and act the show out again, but this time supersleek and on video, which I can then send to my dad. Perhaps years from now, when he’s old and sick and immobile, I’ll ask if he watched it, and he’ll mumble weakly, “I was so proud of you. An orange! Who would’ve expected…Tell me the secret!” He’ll apologize for not buying fruit and for clipping his nails during one of the most significant performances of my life.
Or, more likely…he’ll have no idea what I’m referring to. I’ll raid his video shelf and find the tape buried somewhere under the copies of Dune and Robocop that I stayed up late watching with him so many times. I’ll dust it off, insert it in one of his three VCRs, and push play. Then, only on his sickbed will my dad truly know what it’s like to be forced to be a captive audience. In that one act, old patterns will magically be rewritten, the strength to deal with my dad in empowered ways will be conjured up, and past hurts will undergo amazing transformation. All will be right in the world of showbiz, and all will be right by me. Ta daaa!
