One of those gigs that will live with you forever.
I
t has taken me more than 2 months to get my head around one of the most special gigs I’ve ever been involved with. As a professional magician I am invited to do a lot of shows for good causes. In this case, I was called by a pal I have run into through the years, mostly in the avant-garde music scene, where I hang my hat often. While I don’t play a musical instrument, I am frequently found gigging with experimental musicians. The fellow who called me in September, 2012 was a journalist who had been in a punk band called The Monads back in 1977.Michael Azerrad had since gone on to prove that you could be a drummer in a current band (King of France), and also write hit books such as Come As You Are, written about the grunge musical group Nirvana. (Michael hit a “jackpot” very unexpectedly. Nir-vana was famous, and the book was green-lighted, but, no one could have foreseen that Kurt Cobain, the lead of Nirvana, would commit suicide just a short time after the book came out. Consequently, Michael became known, in 1994, as we already knew in 1977, as the hip cat with his ear to the track, as pianist/composer Bill
Photos of the Teletheon Booth
Marx says, “So hip, he was hip, when hip was Hep.”)
“Hey, do you know anything about Occupy New York?” my friend began. I did. I’d circled the grounds of the mas-sive crowd of those sitting in the Wall Street area letting their displeasure be known (for nearly a year) about the very questionable lending practices of major banks. Old established in-vestment houses such as Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers went out of business in the early 21st century be-cause of reckless financial practices;
some downright illegal—though none have been prosecuted, just as assault weapons are still common. If money can not be used an assault weapon, then the rest of this article may not interest to you.
While Michael Azerrad was not the
“point man” to the press, his friends were, and on November 14, 2012, The New York Times, ran a quarter–page story titled Occupy Wall St. Offshoot Aims to Erase People’s Debts:
Ariel Kaminer wrote:
A group of professors, documentary film makers, corporate drop outs and others had spent months protesting Americans’ debt burden when a novel idea arose: What if they could just wave a magic wand and make some of the debt disappear?
The group named themselves Strike Debt and the idea (Azerrad’s initially) was this: Collect as much money as you could, seek those with burden-some debts mostly the result of preda-tory lending, and then tear up the balance sheet. In other words, make the debt(s)…disappear.
That’s why Michael was calling me.
While I have certainly done benefits ranging from children born with AIDS sponsored by Hoover vacuum cleaners in England, attended by Princess Anne;
to aiding methadone rehab centers for heroin addicts to get clean, this call had the ring of something very special. My instincts proved correct.
The evening was set to raise money and then purchase huge debt at roughly twenty cents on the dollar.
Or, for 20% of a full debt, be able to literally buy debt away. Except, that reduced debt was NOT passed on to the initial debtor. Instead, we at Strike Debt, simply agreed to “give those in suffocating debt the surprise of their lives.” The undertaking by Michael’s friends, whom he said, “ran with my idea” were led by: Ann Larson, Thomas Gokey, Christopher Casuccio and Laura Hanna.
The well-known comedian Janeane Ga-rafolo, a group of “radical nuns”, former Sonic Youth member Lee Ranaldo, hu-morist David Rees (author of “Get Your War On”) a mariachi band, Lizz Win-stead (a co-founder of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central cable TV) physical comedian Peter Straus (formerly a Ringling clown), rappers, columnists, and your scribe, a master magician, all participated in what was termed “a Rolling Jubilee” on the evening of November 18, 2012 at Le Poisson Rouge, formerly the famous Village Gate Theatre. For all you magic fans, this is where Richiardi famously played his 1975 Evening of Magic and Illusion splattering his severed victims so close to the audience that many left the theatre with bloody clothing.
Our evening was not bloody at all. The show began promptly at 8pm and was broadcast live over the Internet, fol-lowed by thousands in what I heard were at least 40 countries. In the club, averages of attendees ranged from 700 to 1500. It was hard to get at a real number because the crowd was massive, loud, involved every step of the way, and had one of the greatest communal vibes I have ever been in, anywhere from Pete Seeger’s famous Clearwater Festival that succeeded in
cleaning up toxic dumping in the mighty Hudson River, to the environmentally conscious Wetlands music club, sadly shuttered by landlord greed in the late 90’s. Yes, indulgences wafted in the air and Security guards smiled;
all were involved in a real humanitarian effort—strangely enough, something selfless. This was not self-promotional show business. Laura Hanna and Christopher Casuccio said in the Times article, “This is our coming out party … to transform the economic system.”
You see, just as Jerry Lewis made his televised Muscular Dystrophy Telethon an important event by inviting all his Vegas pals such as Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin to sing, dance and tell jokes, and simultaneously raise millions for fighting the disease, while occupying the airwaves for more than 24 hours, ours was a modern version of that.
Two hours into the evening we were assured we’d raised a whopping $230,000! Confetti flew from the hands of those manning the laptops collecting the cash via the Internet, and our global audience celebrated with us from Trenton, NJ to Prague to Paris to Zurich, San Paolo and Leningrad!
At the time of this writing, Strike Debt has raised more than
$500,000 and it is still growing; other telethons are being organized around the globe.
When I was graduated from college, like everyone else in my class, I was offered an application for an American Express card. I promptly tore it up and laughed as I depos-ited the application in the trash bin saying to myself, “Why would I ever need that?” (I had been working and making
money since I was 14, so knew that if I did not make the money, then it was not mine to spend. Credit was for “other people.”) However, some recent grads did not know better, and were suckered into the world of supposed free credit, convenience cards. At a young age, they got in deep; just as you would to a loan shark. Now, imagine having a per-sonal debt of over $250,000, being 21-years-old, having just finished college, planning on attending medical school that you’ve struggled for four years to have the grades and talent to enter, and soon your debt will be over half a million dollars with an interest rate that will never allow you to get out from under unless you win the lottery or someone lends you a pile of cash as high as an elephant’s eye? Enter Strike Debt.
“Predatory lending” to those without the means to possibly repay the loan is a rampant global practice (I’m being polite) whitewashed by those who say they are helping others, when in reality, they are doing the exact opposite. I realize my opinions may offend and that banks make money by lending money. I’m all too aware of that. I am also aware that when I finally did clear my credit rating of a debt I person-ally carried for a decade, that the “fine print interest rate”
changed yearly, and is now under Federal investigation in the US, for possibly illegal practices.
I was third on the bill that night of about 22 acts. I did my signature invented routine set to music to capture atten-tion. Then I said, “I come from a long line of revolutionar-ies. My mother for one. She was a copywriter on Madison
Avenue since the 50’s. She created the line GIVE UNTIL IT FEELS GOOD. So that’s what we at Strike Debt intend to do.
We’re going to take some money, change it, and then give it away.” I borrowed a dollar bill, changed it, and then threw it back into the ocean of smiling faces and received a cheer.
Mother was right. (I came home to 136 emails from all over the world asking me to make money for them. I could do it once, why not again?)
My whole time on stage—about 4 minutes. Walking off stage, pain seared through my body. Luckily my old clown student Peter Straus was there to catch me. It was adrenalin hitting, fast and hard—sometimes a build up of energy to a performance that doesn’t happen on stage. Backstage it vanished. And then I spent the next 3 hours “working the crowd” and I can tell you, the joy in that room was palpable.
The actor from DIE HARD (With a Vengence) Justin Long (famous from the Apple Computer TV commercials in the US) came up to me and spun me around, telling me that he made his way through the crowd to see my outstretched fingers adorned by silver rings. He said, “Dude, that had meaning!” I mention the above to give a flavor of who was there and what happened to me.
Given New York City had just been slammed by Hurricane Sandy, and left 60,000 homeless, all New Yorkers felt like they needed help. My question is: Who rescues the rescu-ers? We’ll save that for another time.
I urge you to go to: Strikedebt.org or RollingJubilee.org to find out more and how you can be involved in a philan-thropic effort that will use your talents, and help change the structure of a system that has become perverted. If Republics stand by the backbone of its populace, then all deserve a fair shot. The greedy few who think it is fair and rightful to get rich quick because someone else was ignorant of what was REALLY happening to them — that’s a reality we can change. Strike Debt proves that.
Ideally, the magician is a problem-solving icon. I posit that the Strike Debt model, created by a small group, fostered by two creative kids from Briarcliff Manor, NY, both of whom went to the creative work camp called Buck’s Rock, founded by Jung-contemporary Dr. Ernst Bulova (brother of the man who started the watch company!) is a model of the future that sets up a win-win-win scenario:
People under crushing financial burden receive partial relief, banks still make money (just not as much) on their loans, and audiences helping through generous donation are entertained by some of the most talented people alive.
The single greatest cause of bankruptcy (and resultant homelessness) in the US is a health emergency. What hap-pens if you cannot afford or are not eligible for health
insur-ance, your living rent is sky high, and suddenly you contract a virus that requires a lengthy hospital stay? One magician I know of was literally left to die in a hospital Emergency Room because he did not have Health Insurance. His name was Tony Blanco. Had Tony survived, and received care, would the cost of his hospital care have stacked the deck against him during his recovery; as it has for millions? DO NOT think you are immune from this discussion. It affects everyone.
If all of this sounds odd and “freaky” to you, but you “get”
celebrity culture, then look at a gent also asking for Debt Relief for nations such as South Africa. He does it by picking up the phone and talking to world leaders, as he flies on his own plane to his worldwide concerts.
His name is Bono and his band is called U2—-n’est-ce pas?