By far the best stock line I’ve heard from a professional walk-around magician is a response to offers from spectators who offer to buy her a drink as a sign of appreciation for her work. That line is “I’m afraid the only drink I can accept is one I can fold up into my pocket and take home with me.”
One day I hope that I will be an audience member in a show who makes such an offer, receives this line, and can immediately hand them a Capri Sun.
Of course the line is a request for tips, something which to those of us who work for a fixed wage kind of balk at. Indeed the general assumption of the corporate classes is that anyone who is offering a service must have been offered payment upfront or they wouldn’t be doing it in the first place, as such asking for recompense after the fact seems at best naive and at worse downright cheeky. I did a busking course a few years ago and it really did feel kind of dirty to ask for money after the show, like I’d somehow conned people into watching something they thought was free and then delivered a bill.
I was no better than a hotel minibar.
On an intellectual level, I know this is nonsense, people deserve to be compensated for their labour, and asking at the end allows people to decide the value provided with full experience of the product. There’s just something visceral about it though, a idea that runs so deep in the psyche of the capitalist wage slave mindset that it affects us on an emotional gut level.
The same magician who told me the line about folding up drinks also had some advice for performing bill in lemon, which was to leave returned banknotes as messy as possible. Covered in bits of lemon sticky juices, to make the audience less willing to take them home and more likely to just hand them over.
Sadly I can’t think of a pay to replicate that in a post cash society but as a magical purist, who is in it for the art, we need to think about how we can perform bill in lemon at all. Come on a journey with me.
Continue reading “Noteworthy
or Be Like Bill”
