NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON’T
M
y father has spent his whole life collecting jokes. From his years as a young man frequenting nightclubs with names like the Elmwood and the Top Hat across the Detroit River in Canada to his time as a father and community leader attending his weekly Kiwanis Club meetings with his lodge brothers, whenever he would hear a good joke, he would write it down and memorize it. At family functions or at dinner parties with my parents’ friends, ten minutes would seldom pass before my father launched into one of his “stories.”
My father was a great joke teller. He really had impeccable timing and could always land a punch line effectively. His jokes always received a hearty response and over the years I found myself wishing that I, too, could entertain a group of my peers as effectively as my father entertained his.
And so, when I finally got the chance, I jumped at it.
I was in ninth grade and saw a poster in the hall one day announcing that my school’s yearly talent show was gearing up and that auditions were going to be held the following week. I had attended the Chippewa Valley High Talent Show the previous year to see my next door neighbor, Craig, perform. He had bought a small Moog synthesizer and composed an original electronic mini-symphony entitled “Synthesis.” His performance of it consisted of him putting on a suit, platform shoes, and Elton John glasses, plugging his keyboard into the school’s sound system, and then turning it up full blast to show off every sound effect that the good folks at the Moog Corporation had seen fit to include in this starter’s package. I was in awe at the spectacle of someone I knew being on stage in front of such a large audience. And even though most of the people in the crowd were gritting their teeth and smiling politely while small children covered their ears in pain as Craig and his Moog assaulted them aurally, the effect was enough to make me vow that I, too, would one day be mounting that stage and taking part in this yearly cavalcade of teenage talent. Especially when I saw that at the end of the evening, a panel of judges voted for a winner, who was then awarded the staggering amount of fifty dollars cash on top of the honor of being voted that year’s most talented performer. To beat out everyone else and win the adoration of my peers was the most exciting and validating thing I could imagine happening to me.
And so, as I stood there staring at the poster for the talent show auditions, I was filled with excitement. The key to my acceptance by the entire school was right in front of me. And all I had to do was reach out and grab it.
The only problem was what I would actually do that could be considered “talent.”
When I got home that day, I looked around my room to see what inspired me. I had been playing the guitar ever since I was eight and had actually won a classical guitar competition in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the year before (it was only me and one other kid), but, having seen how many people had done musical acts in the previous year’s talent show, I knew that I wouldn’t stand a chance of winning against any of the girls from the swing choir who chose to croon out torch songs and usually ended up placing first, second, and third. No, in order to have any chance at victory, I would have to offer a viable alternative to the singers and musicians who made up the Chippewa Valley High talent pool.
It was then that the answer came to me—I had to do my magic act.
In true geek fashion, I had been into magic for years and had spent almost all my earnings from working at my father’s store on semiprofessional magic tricks and equipment. Knowing the success I’d had in the past entertaining the octogenarians at the various nursing and retirement homes where I’d been performing since I was eight, I figured that translating this success to an audience full of high school students and their parents couldn’t be too huge of a leap. And so I pulled out my magic trunk and started going through my tricks, trying to determine which combination of them would create an act worthy of a fifty-dollar win and the respect of my schoolmates.
I spent the afternoon assembling what I felt to be a strong routine and was feeling pretty good about myself. I would start with the Color-Changing Shoelace trick, followed by a few of my surefire show stoppers, which included the Silk Tube—a clear plastic section of pipe into which three different colored silk handkerchiefs would be stuffed and then blown out the other end to reveal themselves mysteriously tied together—and the Color-Changing Records—a cardboard record sleeve into which three black forty-fives would be placed and then removed to reveal that they had miraculously changed colors. Color changing was a big part of the affordable magic available to us nerds of the world back then. Sawing women in half and making tigers disappear were strictly for those who had the money and the storage space. I would then end my act with a prestidigitacious double whammy: the Hippity Hop Rabbits, followed by my always popular Drum O’ Plenty—a large “empty” silver tube that, once paper had been secured over both ends to transform it into a drum, became a cornucopia of silk handkerchiefs and colored streamers once the magic words were spoken and the paper was broken.
I tried out my act on my parents, who had seen my magic routine in its various forms for the better part of six years. After I was finished, my father furrowed his brow and said, “If you really want to win that talent show, you’ve got to do more than just magic. You’ve got to
entertain
those people.”
My first instinct was to be horribly insulted at this, but I decided to hear the man out. After all, my father had actually entertained people in his time, unlike me, who had simply held the interest of a roomful of retirees who were happy to watch me as an alternative to sitting in their rooms and staring into space.
“Well, what should I do?” I asked him, trying not to sound defensive.
“You’ve gotta make them laugh,” he said, sitting back. “You’ve gotta tell them some jokes.”
I decided to give in to my father’s advice and work with him on my act.
Over the course of my fourteen years on Earth, I had always been a little frightened of my father. He was never mean to me or unduly harsh, but the fact that he owned a store and spent most of his time being in charge of other people gave him an aura of toughness that was always a bit off-putting to me. He was the very definition of a no-nonsense guy. In my mother, I found nonjudgmental acceptance and encouragement of every whim I had, whether it made sense or not. But my father was always the sober rule-maker, the one who would get mad when I appeared in the living room wearing an expensive Pierre Cardin three-piece wool suit on my ten-year-old body, a body whose growth would render the suit unwearable within months, or sigh in frustration at the news that I had used all of my grandmother’s inheritance money to purchase an electric guitar, because the acoustic guitar that I wasn’t that good at playing “wasn’t good enough to play rock ’n’ roll on.” My mother was my enabler and my father was my disapprover and, of course, I always chose my mother’s accepting ways over my father’s practicality. But now, sitting in his den with him, as he leafed through the pages and pages of nightclub jokes he had stored up over the past thirty years, I felt closer to him than I had ever felt in my life. Simply put, he and I were bonding over comedy.
“Okay, here’s a good one to open with,” he said as he brought over a three-by-five index card out of the kitchen recipe box that made up his “joke file.” He told me the joke, an acceptably off-color anecdote about an elephant eating cabbages in a garden, and I listened, laughed, and then memorized every pause and inflection he put into his delivery. I knew I was learning from the master, or at least the only joke master I had access to, and I treated him with the proper amount of respect and deference. Over the course of the next two hours, he and I mapped out a running patter for my magic act that would have made Myron Cohen proud. True, these were nightclub jokes whose comedic expiration date had passed about ten years prior, but to me it didn’t matter. I now had a full-fledged routine that I felt at least stood a fighting chance against the “Moonlight Sonata”s and the “I Got a Name”s that the music department would be throwing my way.
The following week, using a mod 1960s white and yellow plastic stool in the shape of an hourglass as a magic table—a stool that had stood next to the hamper in our bathroom for the past six years—I auditioned my comedy/magic act at the talent show tryouts. And, much to my delight, even though my auditioners sat and watched my routine stone-faced, I was accepted and put on the bill.
Overwhelmed, I spent the next week rehearsing and honing my delivery. Every morning I would awaken with the nervous realization that in just a few days, instead of lying in my bedroom, unobserved by the outside world, I would be up on a stage in front of hundreds of people trying to entertain them and hoping to win fifty dollars by out-talenting my fellow student performers. The idea that I could be under sheets and blankets in the privacy of my own bed at one moment during the day and then a few hours later be up on stage in front of hundreds of strangers, my every word and movement completely exposed and vulnerable to rejection by the masses, was both terrifying and enticing. I had alternating visions of doing my act and either being triumphantly hoisted aloft on the shoulders of my adoring fans or being pelted with tomatoes and rotten eggs, like a bad opera singer in an old Abbott and Costello comedy.
By the time the day of the talent show rolled around, I was both terrified and out of my mind with excitement.
That night, as I waited backstage, I heard performer after performer get up and launch into ballad after sad ballad, each indulging their artistic teenage depression with songs like “Eleanor Rigby” and “Send in the Clowns.” I would occasionally peek out at the audience from the edge of the stage. The show was being held in our cafetorium, which, as the name implied, was half cafeteria, half auditorium. The auditorium part was simply a crude stage that had been built into one of the walls so that if the lunch tables were rolled away and butt-numbing folding chairs brought in, the room could function as if it were a theater, albeit one out of a Third World country. The place was filled to capacity with parents and relatives of the performers, as well as all the students whose acts weren’t accepted into the show, there to see just how crappy the rest of us really were and how unfairly their own artistic skills had been rejected. Since my spot on the program wasn’t until second from last, I had a lot of time to get nervous and watch all the female performers, who made up the lion’s share of the bill, alternately crying on each other’s shoulders as they dealt with massive bouts of insecurity and hugging each other in support, even though it was clear that each one of them wanted the other to lose in order to secure her place in the coveted fifty-dollar spot. They weren’t hugging me, though, an unknown freshman dressed in a knock-off version of a pricey denim squares leisure suit, which was not made up of actual fashionable denim squares sewn together but of one single sheet of low-quality denim pinched and stitched to appear as an amalgamation of high-priced blue jeans patches. I was the lowest of the low in their books—a common variety performer, a populist plate-spinner whose only goal was to entertain the groundlings, not to move or enthrall or introduce an audience to new heights of art and emotion via the miracle of music. I was merely light entertainment to them, a diversion needed by the stage crew to fill time as they pulled a baby grand piano on stage in preparation for a soul-wrenching performance of Carole King’s “It’s Too Late.” I stood and politely held my ground, smiling at them supportively as I went over my 1950s cabaret jokes in my head. I mentally ran through my magician’s checklist, making sure I had loaded the secret compartment in my Drum O’ Plenty correctly, putting the single-color silks on top of the more elaborate floral print scarves I had taken from my mother’s fancy underwear drawer, so that the multicolored extravaganzas would come out last and amaze my audience with their supposed beauty.
My heart was practically pounding out of my chest by the time the evening’s emcee, Ms. Owens, the music teacher, got up to introduce me to the crowd. My tricks were all crammed onto the top of my bathroom-stool magic table as I stood nervously waiting. As the curtains parted and the bright spotlights hit and immediately blinded me, my head filled with visions of myself picking up the stool to move it to centerstage and causing everything to fall off and crash destructively onto the floor. I could sense the crowd sitting in front of me, waiting to see what I would add to the already overlong proceedings, and I cautiously pulled my yellow and white plastic makeshift magic table out to the performance area. It shuddered and shook threateningly as I slid it across the wooden stage floor, and the five feet I pulled it seemed to consume several hours of time. Satisfied that I was in the right spot, I looked up and stared out at the invisible crowd. I could only see the outlines of their heads, but from their silence and lack of movement, I knew the time had come to try to entertain them.
I took a deep, nervous breath and began.
“Ladies and gentlemen, a lot of things that we see in the world are not really what they appear to be. This reminds me of a story . . .”
A graceless way to launch into a joke, to be sure. But I had stated my premise and was now about to elaborate upon it. Nobody at Toastmasters International could take me to task for that, I don’t think. I continued.
“There was a woman who owned a cabbage patch, which sat on top of a hill in her backyard. Well, one night, an elephant escaped from a circus that was passing through her town and, being hungry, this elephant wandered into the woman’s cabbage patch and started eating. The woman looked out her window and saw the elephant on top of the hill silhouetted by the moonlight, so that it was hard to tell which end of the elephant was which. The woman called the police and said, ‘Officer, there’s an elephant in my cabbage patch and he’s pulling my cabbages out of the ground with his
tail.
’ ‘Really?’ said the officer. ‘And what’s he doing with them after he pulls them out?’ “