Justin: your point about pride is well taken. As shown by some of the responses, people can quickly take offense to someone pointing out that a certain maturity is needed to involve oneself in certain aspects of our art. I do not mean years, as you obviously used a range as a representation of a period where growth is supposed to be happening. I mean real world experience. Maybe five, maybe ten years. Of working hard and taking your licks. There will be nights were everything goes swell. There will be other nights when everything goes wrong, and you feel like never showing your face at that particular establishment ever again. People need to understand that J.M. is not taking a stab at your age. That is not the point, the point is experience. Yes, many of us may be talented. And we may practice until the wee hours of the night, until we see ourselves in mirrors, cameras and in front of loved ones doing a trick flawlessly. Then we go out, and as mentioned above we get the drunken idiot that starts by saying "oh yeah, i've seen this one before" and continues by informing everyone about how he saw you control the card to the top, or put it down on the table, or ever better: "yeah yeah, I can tell you're holding two cards." What do you do then? we may have lines practiced to say to this kind of people. We may know exactly what to do. But how does it feel? it is different every time. And the things they say may be harsher every time. You won't always get someone who says: "you need to work on that man", you may get the dude that straight up tells you: "that kind of sucked man, my little brother does that trick and your version is garbage." And yeah, we can all say that we know how to deal with it, how to take it, but if you have so much pride about somebody telling us that we need experience (and damn that is valuable advise) how are we not going to have pride about what we do and perhaps be personally offended when someone does not appreciate it? well, we find out how to manage with experience. Yeah one person may say something and you deal with it with professionalism. But what about 3 people, or 7 or 10? Lets get out there, lets practice and perform, but all Justin was saying is this: it takes time (for most of us, baring the exceptions) for us to be masters of every aspect of our art: slights, patter, audience management, set ups, control over nerves, energy charisma, etc. There are many components, and some of those components can only be practiced by performing. You know how you practiced that dl for hours before showing it to anyone? We have to "practice" performing in front of different audiences the same amount of time if not more for us to gain the experience needed to master our art.
Juan M.
