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| "What am I thinking?" |
As with prior essays by Paw, we cannot vouch that one word of this is true — ed.
There’s
one thing I cannot stand: people who categorize people. No one I’ve
ever met has fit a category after I got to know them better. They
surprise you and you’re left to wonder why on earth you assumed they
were one way or another.
I learned this lesson the hard way – I lost someone because I figured I had a gift to read that person’s mind.
Long before I went on the road and even longer before I met Tim’s dad, Little Tom Hardy – the only mind-reader I know – I worked with an assistant.
We did a mind reading act with Millie on stage, blindfolded, and me in the audience looking for objects to be identified.
I met Millie when my previous assistant called in pregnant.
I didn’t do box jumping illusions so it wasn’t as if Edna couldn’t stay with the show. She decided to stay with her husband and raise a family. That was probably the right decision. Millie was hired by my manager at the time.
She had worked as a secretary, a radio voice, a dancer and finally an assistant. She was young, much younger than me. She claimed to be 22 but my guess was she was pushing 19 if anything.
She sure was pretty.
She was thin but not so thin that you thought she had something wrong with her guts. She had long brown hair and her eyes would light up when she spoke. She was excited about virtually everything. She was excited to be on the road, excited to see California for the first time, excited to learn how to do a mind-reading act, excited to wear the costumes I’d get for her and, according to her, excited to be working with me.
I assumed that because she was working her first gig as an assistant; she thought she had to appear excited about everything.
We talked a lot but I still assumed her interest was feigned.
Surely she couldn’t be excited about learning a mind-reading act that was light-years behind Eddie Fields’ code system. And without a question, she couldn’t be excited about working with or traveling with or knowing me.
Now a days, we’d call that insecurity on my part. Back then, I assumed it was just true. One night we were in Nevada City, California.
Nice town, lousy audiences. We were on the bill with a dancing couple and a man who could say any word backwards. He could even do whole sentences backwards. Unlike the vaudeville rules of thumb, here it was no honor to be the second-to-last act on the bill – the others were terrible. Before we went on, Millie told me that she had to tell me something.
I nodded and waited.
She said she couldn’t tell me before the show because she was so nervous.
Now, we’d done the act about 100 times before that night so I didn’t think she could be nervous about the show. She had something to tell me and whatever it was, made her nervous.
I guessed it was that she was pregnant and was about to leave the act. I was upset by this. We had just gotten the system down. We could even work two ahead (if you’re not a mentalist, you have no idea what I’m…
Continue reading Except on Stage, Mind-Reading is Usually a Mistake
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