Both the shows went well last night, according to the Cruise Director and the passengers who talked to me last night. It’s not the easiest of rooms to work. The audience is on the far side of the dance floor area and if you do choose to work on the dance floor you are too low for the audience at the outer ends of the room to see you clearly.
It would be so much better if the crew rigged the room by moving the audience forward closer to the stage and then, after the shows, either not having dancing at all or clearing the area, which would not take long. I know, from long experience, that the effort would be worth it for all the entertainers.
The ship could not get alongside today in Cozumel; the wind was too great for safety and we have no stern thrusters. The shore authorities decreed that we had to use their very large tender/ferries to get the passengers ashore but that took FAR too long.
I guess that if you are into Mayan ruins and so forth this would be an interesting place but as a port, even though it was much cleaner than we expected, it was just a non stop stream of jewellery and T shirts. Colourful, and a nice walkabout, but I was quite happy to be back on board ship. One of the good features of this trip is to see how far Debbie’s Spanish has come on and as I type she is on the balcony learning more and more. I do admire her persistence.
A Day At Sea
This has been an interesting day in that I finally managed to get online and discover that it is my fault that I couldn’t before. It’s a bit of a rip off charge for what is a very slow connection. £35 for 100 minutes. I managed to get rid of a few queries that had come via emails but then spent most of my time sorting out ebooks onto my e-reader ready for the flight home.
I have come to the conclusion that the people who decry such readers have in fact never used one. I find them much easier to hold that a ‘real’ book and also it is much easier to turn the pages. It can’t be long before the first coloured readers come out. I would put money on them already having them but selling us all the black and white ones first.
The Indian member of staff who does magic in the crew shows was trying to get information out of me and normally I would help but one of the passengers told me that it wasn’t just the tricks that she liked, it was his clever patter. When I asked for an example she said that he did a rope routine with three different length ropes and told a story of the three bears whilst he was doing it.
Seeing as how I wrote that routine when I was 22, and have performed it for the last 52 years you can imagine how delighted I was to hear that. As my own show was on the night after he was on stage I might well have done the same routine and it would have struggled. Why oh why do magicians think they have the right to steal routines? It drives me nuts. I told him and I know he won’t change at all... he cannot see anything wrong with it.
This afternoon Debbie and I sat in the middle of the cabaret floor and were interviewed by Tracey Clegg, the Cruise Director. The audience laughed in all the right places and it passed a pleasant hour.
During tonight we will be travelling up the Mississippi to New Orleans and tomorrow morning we will be going through immigration back into America. Oh what fun.
3 comments:
Never having been a creative person, I've never know the frustration of been copied, but the "magician" crewman who tells your Three Bears story hopefully gets a few extra bob for doing so and will be sending most of his money home to India to support his own and, probably, some extended family as well.
So perhaps you could look upon his plagiarism as your own, albeit unintended, charitable contribution to their well-being,
After seeing the little kids working the stinking rubbish tips in India on the telly last night, every little helps there though quite why the Indian government is spending £1 billion a year on space in the face of such abject poverty, God only knows!.
In the book The Gene Gordon Legacy by David Ginn, there is a 3 Bears Rhyming Patter routine for the Professors Nightmare. I have no idea if it was ripped off from you Paul, or if it was an independent creation. I guess comparing the two scripts would be the only way to know. I don't have the book in front of me to be able to give you more details. I think the book came out in the late 1970s.
To Robert... India now has the largest gold reserves in the world. They have refused, at last, offer of money from the UK. I, too, wonder why they have such poverty.
To Dean... I wrote my 3 bears routine for the Professor's Nightmare in 1960 when I was 22. I am well aware that you do get independent creations. This guy was taught the routine by another magician because he asked to be taught it so he could work like me.
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