Today I would like to share another stupid magic story of mine. I have shared parts of this story in a post from over a year ago but today it gets it’s own post. My story has to do with forgetting what language I have to perform in. When I went to Japan in the summer of 2001 I performed my regular show except for one effect that I worked on just for Japan and of course in Japanese. I put the effect together and rehearsed before going to Japan in Japanese so I had only ever performed this effect in Japanese. In Japan the effect went over well and I still perform this effect to this day. Well, after I came home from my 2 month trip to Japan I had a stage show the next evening in my hometown in Victoria. This show was at a restaurant near my home and seemed like an easy event to do while still jet lagged. So I arrived at the venue set my stage show and then started the show. Everything was going well until I got to my final effect and this was the effect that I had performed only in Japanese. Now of course I was in Victoria BC Canada now and performing in English not Japanese. It was at this moment that I realized I had never performed this effect in English. All the timing, jokes etc. were written in Japanese for a Japanese audience. Lucky I was able to pull the effect off in English but man did I sweat. Luckily I had rehearsed the technical parts and performed it enough that this part was automatic and I just had to quickly stumble creating an English script as I performed it. As far as I know the audience didn’t notice anything but I was sure happy when I finished that effect. Lesson I learned from this is be careful if you are a bilingual performer and performing in  different countries and in different language while suffering from jet lag.

Aaron