Colusa Childrens Festival

Our season is slowly getting busier and busier...no weekends off for the fore-seeable future and week days are filling in. No April Fools!

April 4th we performed for our 10th annual Children's Festival in Colusa. I know it's the 10th because I just dug through the old paperwork (wasn't on a database back then) and found the showform...wow....time flies. The festival is a free event for the folks in that county and offers, besides us, pony rides, jump houses, crafts, and a potpourri of other fun stuff and give-aways. The vendors are various agencies, child care, health care, and local social and public service groups related to families and kids.

The day started off slow but soon packed out. Our 10am show, for example had about 50 people in the audience but the noon show had 150-200. The third show had at least 100 moms, dads, and kids. One thing we did different this year was we gave every single kid who came to the show a "Victor Kent Crystal Metallic magic Wand" and I taught them how to do a couple of tricks with it. (The organization producing the event, in keeping with the event being 100% free, bought the wands to give-away.)

We introduced our new fair-festival opener (mostly....Princess Cynthia and Indiana Miles were absent as they are with a Christian group down in old Mexico building homes and sharing the Gospel over Easter Break.) Our new opener is a parade similar to our theater show version. I roll out Olivia's Block illusion (see the last blog), I pick up the block show it all around set it down and open it on all sides, I drop a whistle in it and out pops Olivia ...I lift her out set her on the block and she blows away at the whistle starting the "Circus". Princess Amelia comes out carrying a single flower and changes it into a flower bush. Victor Jr comes out shackled at the wrists and in a blink of and eye escapes. Jim comes out on his short Unicycle and demonstrates his juggling skills with clubs then I step forward and pound a nail into my head....Princess Cynthia will perform a quick change and Miles and bullwhip flurry while on the walking globe once they are back.

In the show new skills were demonstrated when Victor performed his 100' rope tie...three kids from the audience tied him up and he escaped in less time than it took to tie him up....it was hilarious. Jim added more balancing to his show (if you ever meet him in a dentist office, a school room or any place the furniture isn't nailed down then you have seen him balance, tables, chairs, brooms, lamps, or anything on his face)...Now he's doing it with a 6' ladder....wait until you see what he plans to do with it. Amelia introduced a new light bulb lighting and explosion with her mind as well as a cool new double mind-reading trick. Olivia drew a bird on a piece of paper and it came to life.

It's exciting to see the new stuff get the reactions they have been getting. After all, our goal, first and foremost, is to entertain. Sure sometimes we do things to entertain ourselves and the audience is left scratching their head...it's our own little inside thing. But the audience is never left un-entertained...when we can't make them happy then it's time to quit.

God bless each of you.

Victor