Archive for February, 2010
 Where in the world am I today?: New Delhi, India.
Prologue: I recall meeting Karen at a juggling convention in Amherst, MA back in the late 80s. At the time I seemed to be getting to quite a number of the regional and national IJA conventions and recall seeing Karen at many of them. We didn’t really hang out until we were both performing at the Calgary Stampede in 1999. Karen was working on a lovely stage off to one side of the park, trees, grass, pleasant. I, on the other hand, was brought in to play near the Midway with the asphalt, confusion and noise… I managed to carve out a little nook for myself to make the gig work-able and as we shared a greenroom/dressing room space I bumped into Karen a lot over the days we were both at the Fair. Made a point of going to see her show a few times and also enjoyed a very civilized dinner with her off site one night which was very pleasant. In a nutshell, Karen is a savvy business woman with a show that’s tailor-fit to the Fair and Festival market especially those with a Western component!
STATS
Name: Karen Quest
Birthday: January 8.
Place of Birth: St. Louis, MO.
Started Peforming/Working in the Industry: First professional juggling job: 1977 Magic Mountain Theme Park, Los Angeles. Prior to that, dabbled in amateur clowning and juggling. Cowgirl Tricks show created in 1997.
Discipline: Circus and Variety Arts, Comedy.
Website: http://www.cowgirltricks.com
Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSHilbB7z54
Venues Worked: Festivals, State and County Fairs, Corporate and Private Events, Schools, Theme Parks, Stage, Television, Film.
Hot 10 Questions:
- What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream and why? • No ice cream, but love frozen yogurt, coffee, cappuccino, peanut butter, chocolate and vanilla, especially mixed! Why? Because it’s palate-pleasing.
- Name one movie that would make it to your Top 10 all-time great films. • The Princess Bride.
- What was your favorite toy from childhood? • Wooden blocks and Barbie.
- Who were your biggest inspirations when you got started? • The Great Salt Lake Mime Troupe, my college movement teacher, jugglers, Dimitri, Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, Marx Brothers to name a few.
- From the world of animation what one character do you most identify with or see yourself in? • Jesse from Toy Story.
- Name something that scares you. • Ignorant mean people, more so if they are drunk.
- Apart from the entertainment industry, name one other job you’ve had. • Television Production Purchasing Agent for an animation studio. I described my job as Part Bloodhound, Part Retriever or Finding Things That Don’t Exist in Life As We Know It.
- What’s something you haven’t done yet that you’d like to try? • Marriage.
- What’s your least favourite thing about being a performer? • What it takes to get the work.
- If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? • “What are you doing here? You’re not due for another 50 years! Get back and keep up the good work.”
The Nugget:
Pick one nugget of wisdom you’ve picked up from your career in Show Business to share with the World.
“The three most important words in Show Biz: Know Your Audience.“
–Karen Quest
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 Where in the world am I today?: New Delhi, India.
My friend, Ben Robinson, from New York sent me a couple of links to some on-line video footage of the great magician Slydini. The videos were included as part of an article by Dick Cavett and the footage was originally shot for the Dick Cavett show back in 1977 and 1978. If you’ve got the time, I highly recommend swinging by –
Conjuring Slydini
and
Conjuring Slydini (Part 2)
– and give yourself enough time to enjoy the fact that this man’s artistry was captured on video tape and preserved.
The article that accompanies the video is also great and it’s clear that Dick Cavett had an enormous respect and admiration for his mentor. The article was also containes a hint of melancholy as it seemed as though in his later years Slydini more or less vanished from the public eye and was virtually unknown. Were it not for the fact that some of his artistry had been preserved on the Dick Cavett show, we might not have such a wonderful record of what this man was capable of.
At the beginning of the second video Dick Cavett introduces Slydini as primarily a retired magician who at that stage of his career was doing more teaching and coaching than performing. And I was somehow struck by the fact that it would have been even more amazing to see his work ten to twenty years prior to then these videos were shot. As an older man his grace and poise, the fluidness of his moves and the precision of his sleights are obvious, but to have seen his work when he was a young dashing man must have been amazing. Still it’s clear from the footage taken on the show that Slydini had rehearsed his moves and tricks to perfection.
I have another magician friend named Greg Moreland who teaches magic classes on cruise ships and I helped him out with one at one point. Something he said really stuck with me –
“Don’t practice until you can do it right, practice so much that you can’t do it wrong.”
From watching Slydini and from reading the article written by Dick Cavett it was clear that Slydini shared this eye for perfection and work ethic.
In a day and age when the breadth of our knowledge is vast thanks to the ability to google just about anything and know a little about a lot, it was refreshing for me to slow down to appreciate a craftsman at work. Although I don’t consider myself a huge fan of magic, I am a fan of great performance and it was a treat to be sucked in to watching Slydini as he captivated his audience.
Posted in Performance, Reviews, Thoughts | Comments Off on Slydini
 Where in the world am I today?: New Delhi, India
I got an unexpected treat on a visit to Dilli Haat where I encountered three Indian ‘Street Performers’ who were obviously brought in to entertain for a group of VIP visitors – a sort of ‘mini’ corporate event. Wikipedia does a pretty good job of describing Dilli Haat as:
“Dilli Haat is a combination food plaza and craft bazaar located in the heart of Delhi…There are also stalls of crafts from all over India, and from a variety of cultural traditions of India.”
It’s a great spot to find decent quality crafts from all over india which makes it a perfect stop for visiting dignitaries.
It was pretty clear that these three performers were waiting to deliver a quick hit of Indian Colour so I stuck around the gate to see what was going to happen. I’ve done my share of this sort of gig in Canada, quite a few in Whistler actually where you’re brought in for a corporate event to amuse and entertain guests as they enter the banquet hall, then provide close up table performances and or a full performance for the evening so I totally ‘got’ what was going on.
Sure enough, about five minutes later the performers get the signal that the VIPs had arrived, the drummer kicks it up a notch, the horse guy starts galloping around (no El Gleno mind you) and the lady starts dancing around. The VIPs are ushered through the main gates and receive a flower garland around their neck and a bindi on their foreheads… Boom, instant color and photo-op! The street performers then scrambled into the bazar and raced ahead to the next performance location.
This next location was where the ‘Fire Breathing‘ Performance took place and judging from the smell of the flame and residual fuel that didn’t burn off the guy was using kerosene for the blowing… I always wonder about the long term side effect of putting that stuff into your body and this guy wasn’t skimping on the flames…
As I walked around the venue I ran into that group of performers a couple of other times and it certainly seemed like the India equivalent to gigs I’ve done in North America. Pretty cool to fly all the way around the world and run into a very similar event to those I’ve done at home and rather fun to be able to sit back and not have to panic about being out there shaking it for the client as I preferred being the spectator as opposed to the performer on that particular evening.
Posted in Job Opportunities, Performance | Comments Off on Street Antics at Corporate Events
 Where in the world am I today?: Mumbai then on to New Delhi, India.
Being in India has been great so far! My shows at the TTF & OTM Tourism Trade Show in Mumbai were a hoot and I was really interested to be in front of crowds in India because they seem to react differently than just about any other audiences I’ve performed for in the world. How? Well I felt like I was as much a curiosity as I was a performer. I gathered large crowds just about every show I did, but the spectators looked on with curiosity and reserve as opposed to the enthusiastic exchange I’ve encountered in other places in the world. I remember having this feeling when I first went to Japan too and over the course of about fifteen years and thousands of show in Japan I eventually figured out how to make my shows really work. Basically what it always comes back to is communication. If you can clearly communicate the basic rules of a game (ie your show) people will usually come along and play. I’ve based my career on this!
The other fun thing about my time in India (and this relates to the point above about communication) is that my employer, Derek Galpin from the CTC, is a guy I’ve worked for a number of times and he’s always pushing me to bring something new… The conversation usually goes something like this. What do you have that’s new for me this time around???
I’m well aware that this is coming before I even leave for one of these jobs and decided to swing by the local magic shop in Vancouver before I headed to India and picked up a set of Bounce -NO- Bounce Balls. I’d been aware of these from having seen other performers use them but had never really spent much time playing with them. I figured the six days of 5 – 8 shows a day would give me plenty of opportunities to play with these balls and experiment with what could be done with them while I was in India and I wasn’t disappointed.
The concept behind these balls is very simple. You have two one inch diameter black rubber balls that look identical – one bounces, the other hits the ground with a thud and doesn’t bounce at all. The simple presentation goes like this… Take the bouncy ball, bounce it a few times, then make the switch and hand the non-bouncy ball to the spectator to bounce… The expectation is that the ball will bounce and when it doesn’t, it gets a lovely reaction.
I had a lot of fun playing with this simple gag while I was in India because the rule of the game required so little explanation. I bounced the ball, I handed it to a spectator, they tried to bounce it, but it wouldn’t bounce. It was just a lovely bit of simple communication with a lovely unexpected outcome which played really well for as a crowd gathering bit.
I had made a note to myself a couple of months back to pick some of these up for the Piazza Sets that I do on Princess Cruises as this sort of gag would be ideally suited to that environment.
I’ve always sort of shied-away from putting too much magic into my show as I feel it’s a much different art form than what I’ve made a career out of, but I was surprised by how much fun I had with this little gag. As I left India I gave the set I bought to my employer because he enjoyed the gag so much too, so I’ll have to pick up another set when I get home, but I’ll happily make the purchase as I really did enjoy the fun of this simple idea and can see getting a lot of milage out of these as a crowd building bit in the right environments. Fun.
Posted in Performance, Technical Tuesdays | 1 Comment »
 Where in the world am I today?: Mumbai, India.
OK… I’ve got to admit that I’m still not an entire convert to the world of Facebook. I know so many are and so many are now doing business and staying in touch almost exclusively via Facebook… The ability to quickly update your Facebook Status is like simple blogging for the masses and here I am writing a more traditional blog and have the gall to not fully embrace a site and it’s technologies… I feel like an old man clinging to the way of the past at times, but I’m slowly starting to cave.
I started working with a manager a while back and one of the things I asked him in one of our recent meetings was –
“Hey… Should I have a Facebook Fan Page?”
Yes was his immediate answer and beyond the yes, he told me he’d create it for me. Now I should also point out that my son Koji created a Facebook page for me too called –
I bet we can find 10 000 pope that like The Checkerboard Guy
And to my surprise a bunch of people actually signed up for the page, but the new Page that my manager, Corwin, created for me is much more a page designed for Fans of the show and can be found here –
The Checkerboard Guy Fan Page on Facebook
Now it’s going to take me a little while to get up and running with this newfangled Facebook Fan Page and I’ve done ZERO promoting of the page, but again was surprised that a couple of people who came to my shows in India tracked the page down and became Fans… Amazing… I’ll be curious to see if posting this to my blog generates any additional interest as well… Feel free to swing by and become a fan if you like.
Though I semi-resist Facebook, I’m well aware that it has become an essential part of the overall promotional presence that one needs to have in this electronic day and age.
Posted in Marketing | 1 Comment »
 Where in the world am I today?: Mumbai, India.
“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
–Mahatma Gandhi, Indian political and spiritual leader (1869 – 1948)
Addendum…
“Eating Crow and admitting fault is the first step in receiving forgiveness from others”
–David ‘checkerhead’ Aiken
A quote from Gandhi seemed appropriate on all sorts of levels today. I arrived 24 hours late into India because of a HUGE BRAIN FART. I misread the flight details for February 3rd and showed up at airport expecting to board a 2:00 pm flight which had actually left at 2:00 am. I scrambled to rebook the flight and get myself to India in time to start the gig and succeeded in doing so and shows today went really well – Phew! Thankfully my employer from the Canadian Tourism Commission took it all in stride and all it cost me in penance to receive his forgiveness was several rounds of drink when I got to town. It could have been worse!
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 Where in the world am I today?: Hong Kong and Mumbai, India.
Prologue: Back at the beginning of 1990 I spent three months traveling from city to city, from festival to festival in Australia and met some great performers and did some fantastic shows! Rex Boyd was one of them. We met at the Adelaide Fringe Festival and along the way I got Rex a list of events in Canada that would be worth visiting… In the months that followed I ran into him again at some of the events that I had suggested… I specifically remember him arriving in Ottawa along with Drue Franklin and Angus McDonald for Canada Day then zipping off to Chicago for the 4th of July then showing up with Nick Nicholas at the Kingston Buskers Rendez-vous and sort of crashing the event… They were so well received in Kingston that the Festival bent the rules and ended up including them in the line-up which was pretty cool and pretty fun! The camaraderie we shared on the pitch and over shared meals was always a treat… I remember one group show in particular back when we first met when a group of the performers who were in Adelaide for the Fringe Festival decided on a whim to head out to Gleneig Beach in Adelaide and threw together a team show as the sun set into the ocean… It was magical! As Rex commented when I reminded him of that show and the great meal that followed –
Those team shows and group meals are by far my favourite part of being a street performer. I wish they could happen more often.
Rex has also been really supportive of various side projects I’ve tackled and ordered trading cards for a number of years as well as participating in Episode #25 of the One Minute With Dave video Podcast I did during 2006… Great guy, always game for a challenge and fun to watch in performance!
STATS
Name: Rex Boyd
Birthday: 1966.
Place of Birth: Texas.
Started Peforming/Working in the Industry: 1982, comedy club open-mike nights; 1983, Kansas City Renaissance Festival
Discipline: Comedy, Juggling, Dance, Mime.
Website: http://www.rexboyd.co.uk
Video Links: http://www.rexboyd.co.uk/rex_boyd_2009/Site/Noisiest_Mime.html
http://www.rexboyd.co.uk/rex_boyd_2009/Site/Robin_Hood_Show.html
Venues Worked: Comedy clubs in US and UK, street/fringe/arts festivals in US, UK, Canada, Europe, Australia, NZ and all various kinds of other related things.
Hot 10 Questions:
- What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream and why? • Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Fish. Why? Fish flavored ice cream!? UGH! No way! But chocolate fish flavored ice cream? Now that’s more like it! And you have all the fun of hunting down those little critters and eating them whole like you are a giant.
- Name one movie that would make it to your Top 10 all-time great films. • Groundhog Day because I first saw it in Hawaii after flying there from NZ which meant that after crossing the international date-line, I too was forced to repeat the same day..
- What was your favorite toy from childhood? • Probably my Hot Wheels race track but I’d like to put in a nod for the yo-yo. Although I was never really very good at yo-yo, I had one given to me by a professional performer who used me as a volunteer when I was about 7 or 8 in a tiny show he did in my local 7-11 convenience store to promote yo-yo’s. As I remember he balanced a coin on my ear and then knocked it off with his yo-yo. He then gave me the yo-yo. This certainly would have been the first time I ever saw a variety/street show in person. It was also a time when I was a big fan of the Smother’s Brothers from television and of course Tommy Smother’s yo-yo man routine.
- Who were your biggest inspirations when you got started? • My mom used to let me stay up late occasionally to watch Johnny Carson and Saturday Night Live with her. This introduced me to Steve Martin, George Carlin, Richard Pryor and all the original SNL cast. At the age of 17 when I was working at the Kansas City Renaissance Festival my much more practical inspiration came from the seasoned stage acts performing there such as the superb jugglers Bryan Wendling, Scott Burton, and Phil Lindsay with Sideshow and the anarchic mime of Danny Lord. A few years later when I hit the road full-time and made my first trip to Covent Garden I can remember watching Nick Nicholas doing an awesome show on probably my first day there. I can remember thinking to myself that even though I was a much better juggler than Nick, I was determined to try to figure out how to work a crowd as well as he could.
- From the world of animation what one character do you most identify with or see yourself in? • Charlie Brown when I’m feeling down and Snoopy when I’m feeling like “Joe Cool.”
- Name something that scares you. • The thought of the yo-yo guy in my 7-11 hitting me in the face with his yo-yo when I was 7 and thus putting me off performers forever.
- Apart from the entertainment industry, name one other job you’ve had. • Sales assistant in a sporting goods store. “Would you like to try on the Nike in a size 9 sir?”
- What’s something you haven’t done yet that you’d like to try? • I’ve been doing modern-jive partner dancing for the past couple of years. Now I really fancy having a go at Argentinean Tango.
- What’s your least favourite thing about being a performer? • Having to pester people to book me for gigs that I don’t really want to do in order for me to make a living. When the gig actually comes around I more often than not actually enjoy doing the show, it’s just the pestering people to get booked that I don’t like.
- If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? • “Welcome Rex, I understand that you really enjoy hanging out with street performers at a big festival watching shows and doing shows and partying with your friends, so I’ve arranged to have a big street festival here in heaven whenever you wish.”
The Nugget:
Pick one nugget of wisdom you’ve picked up from your career in Show Business to share with the World.
“There’s no one right way to go about forging a career in show business. You’ve just got to do what feels right for you and to show a determination and persistence that comes from the fact that you intend to be the best that you possibly can for the simple reason that this is what you want to do more than any thing else.“
–Rex Boyd
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Where in the world am I today?: Hong Kong International Airport on my way to Mumbai India.
I’m sitting in Hong Kong Airport 9:30ish am local time on Friday morning which is actual about 5:30 pm Vancouver time on Thursday so I’m a bit torn as to which day I should post this to… In the interests of keeping up appearances and posting daily(ish). I’ll date this one for Thursday…
A very brief post today just to announce to the world that the migration of all things Checkerhead is taking place in the next day or so and I’m going to take a wee break from the blog until the move is complete. This is so the people who are helping execute the move don’t have to worry about missing any posts I attempt to make while they’re moving things over to the new servers… The move should hopefully be seamless and no-one will be aware that this move even happened, but just to make things easier I’m going to take a step back while all the technical voodoo is happening.
Besides… I’ve got to wrap my head around being on the other side of the world, jet lag and getting ready for shows for the Canadian Tourism Commission at the Travel and Tourism Fair in Mumbai that starts on Saturday.
Fingers crossed that everything progresses according to plan!
Posted in Thoughts | Comments Off on Greetings from Hong Kong
Where in the world am I today?: North Vancouver, BC, Canada
The decision was made recently to migrate my various websites to a single location and the process of making it happen really started today… I gathered all of the passwords, user ids, email addresses, server addresses, blah blah blah, you name it and constructed a master document to help make the move as painless as possible…
I sort of view this like the process of upgrading software or a computer operating system. OK, I’ll admit it, I’m a bit of a tech geek and am easily convinced that upgrades are a good idea even though they sometimes mean re-learning how to do something I already know how to do… Perhaps I view it like a sort of Sudoku puzzle to figure this stuff out… It’s my way of keeping my brain young by forcing it to relearn systems that have worked ‘just fine’ for months if not years…
Does this mean I’m a sucker for punishment? Well… Perhaps…
As much as I’m a bit of a tech geek and would love to know everything there is to know about everything I sometimes get distracted and my focus strays from the things I should actually be working on. To help gain a bit of perspective I’ve started working with a hired gun who’s keen to update some of the systems I have of marketing and promoting my show and help me keep my focus on the things that will actually benefit me more than getting bogged down with minutiae. He’s good! I’m excited about the direction that things are headed in, and this week’s project is the migration of my various websites –
http://www.checkerhead.com
http://www.thecheckerboardguy.com
http://www.checkerboardguy.com
http://www.cbgentertainment.com
http://superstarperformers.com
– all over to a single domain hosting service. It’s all part of the master plan and although change is sometimes scary, the timing of the move feels good or various reason.
The hosting service that Mr. Hired Gun suggested was, etWEBHosting.com which is also the home to my friend David Duchemin’s various projects. Apparently the customer service and support are off the charts – cool… If the migration of the various bits and pieces comes off with out a hitch I’ll be thrilled. If things go sideways and you (or I) can’t access the blog, you’ll have been given a head’s up.
As the logo above says, etWEBHosting is a division of Electric Toad Internet Solutions, so let’s here’s hoping that Electric Toad know’s what it’s doing!
Posted in Marketing, Technical Tuesdays | 1 Comment »
 Where in the world am I today?: North Vancouver, BC, Canada
Back in the Fall of 2001 I performed with my friend Iori Mikumo at the Shizuoka Diadogei Festival in Shizouoka, Japan. I wanted to see if a story-telling show in the genre of ‘Sak Theatre‘ or ‘Men in Tights‘ would fly in Japan as I’d never seen it attempted. We took the Japanese Children’s Story “Momotaro” and used members of the audience to play key roles in the story. Great fun and over the course of the five-days we performed the show actually ended up looking like a show and the audiences in Japan ‘got’ the format. It was pretty cool!
As part of the build for the show I threw together the logo that accompanies this post and added the tag “Since 2001” to the logo as a semi-joke because usually ‘since such and such a year’ is supposed to imply a certain longevity in business… That we were saying we’d been around since earlier that same year seemed to be both ironic and comedic all at the same time.
There is something to the notion that being in business a long time as it implies a certain success rate that new clients can derive a certain comfort in. The trick seem to be to imply longevity, but a spirit of innovation and growth that doesn’t make you look stagnant. I sometimes kick myself because I haven’t had a chance to update my promotional videos in years… The look and content is a bit dated and I know I really should update things, but I’ve had no shortage of excuses for not getting to this project, but I digress…
The point I’m trying to make is that this notion of longevity if used properly in your marketing materials can be an excellent benefit to promote to prospective clients. It’s why collecting letters of reference and newspaper articles to include in a promo kit helps sell you. If you’re show has stood the test of time it provides a certain credibility to your claims of being the greatest thing since sliced bread!
I remember watching a video that Willie Tyler uses at the beginning of his cruise ship performances which is more or less a slide-show of some of the moments from his career. Pictures of him as a kid with the very first Lester, shots of him working with Sammy Davis Jr., Shots of him working on Laugh In, Shots of him with Richard Pryor… Not only was it really cool to see some of the legends of show business that he’d worked with, it gave a really nice build to the moment that he stepped out on stage. You were given a glimpse of his incredible history which then made you appreciate his performance even more.
The whole process of selling one’s show requires you to provide evidence to a client that will convince them to hire you over some other act. A successful history in the business can be a very powerful element to this equation – be clever about how you use it and you will definitely glean the benefits!
Posted in Marketing, Performance | Comments Off on ‘Since 2001…”
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Where in the world am I today?: Vancouver, BC, Canada
