Iceland, here I come!
I guess not that many people on a worldwide basis get to visit Iceland (and Greenland) but I have that thrill later this week. Actually I have visited both places before and they are rather pleasant. That pesky volcano, in Iceland, made my early part of the year rather miserable by scrambling my air travel to strangely convoluted forms. Now I’m quite excited to get a picture or two of the (still erupting) volcano.
One thing you can’t do on these kind of gigs is forget any key props! Your chances of finding Flash Paper in Iceland are about as slim as finding Ice Cubes in your garden in a Vegas summer day.Planning ahead is the key to world travel as a performing magician; that and a natural talent for intuition and on the spot creativity. Oh, and learning to dress in layers!
I begin this run from Iceland to Boston, then go from New York to Bermuda and back and finally finish it off with a little hop through the Caribbean. Three different cruises through three different climates on three different cruise lines. Then home for a month to continue working on our house in Los Angeles. I never gets dull, this kind of lifestyle although the travel gets tedious. The alternative is to spend a long block on one ship–which is a very distant last resort to me.
By the end of the year, I plan to radically change my work process, but much as I look forward to that, there is a little part of me that will miss trying to acquire mini rubber bands for my folding-half from orthodontist in Chile! You never quite know if you do that whether you will wake up with a front tooth replaced with a golden replica, a bad headache and a big bill in a currency you don’t understand!
Next year I plan to enter the crowded world of purveyors of magical routines, props and knowledge. Having spent 40 years on the road, it seems only fair to pass on some of the knowledge I have acquired. I see so many items being sold that while ‘neat’ and ‘cute ideas’ that I suspect a market exists for the more commercial items that can really keep you working and fend of the wolf that stands howling at the other side of the front door. After many years of consciously keeping an arm’s length from my fellow magicians, I am booking lectures, setting up seminars and marketing routines that have been the lifeblood of my professional career. It is fun.
I promised myself that I would be retired (more or less) by sixty and that looks like being the case. Of course, a true performer never really retires, but he does cut down to merely performing exactly what he wants to do. I am putting together a short list of performers I want to work with, in fact a very short list of performers I want to represent in this wacky world we call entertainment. Let me know if you are interested in knowing more about my future plans as I really don’t plan on making a big ‘Ta Da’ or becoming a magical fountainhead of knowledge and advice. I am a firm believer that one of the things we learn in magic is that the more you share the secrets, the more diluted the message becomes.
Drop me an email at nicklewin1@me.com if you want more information on my plans. My only stipulation, I hate and refuse to deal with rude people: life is just to short.
REMARKABLE MAGIC 
loved reading this entry nick. hope you are feeling better and can handle the new adventure to iceland. have a fun trip. louie