crowd, and he was doing the same to me. A lesson there for all of us. We should concentrate on our own game, work our own ground, and not worry about what others are doing. Time spent jealously looking at others is time that we will not get back.
Before I tell you what actually happened that day I want to give you some thoughts on what I call ‘the money trick’. This is not necessarily a trick with money. It is the trick, or maybe ‘routine’ would be a better word, that will make people reach for their wallets rather than their spare change.
Any study of the art of the street will quickly show that some tricks come up time and time again, and they are often what we refer to as the classics - The cups and balls, A routine with a borrowed bill or ring, card to impossible location, strait jacket escape, any trick that seems fraught with potential danger to life and or limb.
In my case my money trick is a trick with money. I call it the bill in banana but that is not what actually hap- pens, the banana is merely comedy by-play. I also have a chop cup routine with large loads from my hat which I also close with. Both those tricks become openers if I am doing bigger circle shows and in that case I close with a strait Jacket escape. Today I am doing a sidewalk semi as there is not really enough space or big enough crowds for the strait jacket. And besides that... it’s hot!
The key to getting money out of an audience however is not the trick. The key is in your relationship with the audience. Any trick will do as long as it is a good one. You will make a lot more money if you find ways to make the audience like you and care about you. You should not be just a guy or a girl doing tricks, if you are they will watch and walk away, you need to somehow cross over into the personal space of the audience and become their friend. It is very hard to describe exactly how to do this. You need to experiment and try different attitudes. Part of it is a twinkle in your eye, another part is your easy and like- able manner, still another is your ability to say stuff that others wouldn’t get away with. Ask yourself this question. How much do you care? What do you think about the audience? What are you really doing? If you really want to give them your best then they will want to share what they have with you.
On a less esoteric note there are things that you can ac- tually do to draw people in and the biggie is to involve them. Give them stuff to hold and examine, ask their names and make them the stars of the show. Be gener- ous and share the stage. See yourself as the enabler, someone who is there to release the child in each of your
audience. Find ways to let your audience get the big laughs.
But none of that stuff did me any good at all on Sunday! I was smiling and talking, my eye was twinkling, I was juggling and joking, trying every trick that I knew and yet I could not stop a single sole. Even the children were ignoring me! A couple of times I managed to get a ‘roll- ing crowd’ (see last month) but never got a show going before they evaporated.
This curse lasted for the first hour and well into the sec- ond, at last I managed to get something started. The crowd started to build and I had an amazing show. By this time I was sapped of energy as it takes more effort to pull a crowd than it does to do a show. Somehow I got through it and with a sense of relief hatted the crowd and that one show was my biggest hat of the weekend. Having broken the curse I had a short break and went for a coffee to recharge my batteries. Returning twenty minutes later with renewed energy from the coffee and counting the previous hat I ended up exactly where I was an hour earlier - unable to stop a single person! The only crowd I had in the next hour was when Jeremy arrived with his family and offered to seed my crowd (it only takes a couple of people to get things going). Besides it was his daughters birthday and she deserved some mag- ic other than that on offer from her father. Twenty min- utes later my audience still consisted of... you guessed it... Jeremy and his family. They were a great audience. They laughed and clapped and I think that they genuinely en- joyed the show. But try as hard as I might I could not get anyone else to join the fun.
At this point I decided to pack up and go home. Not defeated as I had a great weekend. I relearned some for- gotten techniques and even learned some new ones. If you want to learn how to be a great performer you need stage time, something that you can only get in a place where you can do several shows a day.
Working as a street entertainer is the most fun you can have with your clothes on - even on a bad day.