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November 15, 2023

Dealing With Illusions

By Barry Rudesill

So, for the past four weeks, I’ve been working on a project...of sorts.

I’m an illusionist, and I was asked to do a show for a Halloween event. I typically don’t do shows on Halloween, but this group was doing a community outreach with the goal of providing children – and families – with a safe place to be on Halloween night. And so, with a couple of weeks of prep time, I pulled out my gear.

Now you have to understand one thing: I have two areas of illusions in my house. The first is my “tool kits”, which contain all of the materials I routinely use in my shows. The second is...scattered throughout the house, where I have bookshelves and closets filled with books, videos, props, and more.

As I got out my tool kits, I began to realize that I haven’t cleaned and reorganized my gear in...decades? (Maybe not decades, but it’s been a long, long time!) So, I said to myself, “Self? How long could this take?” And so I began to clean up my illusions...

Now, over a month later, I’m STILL cleaning!

First came the tool kits. I chose them to start with because these are the boxes that I take with when I perform. I know every trick and prop, and most are in good shape. When I took everything out and examined the gear, it didn’t take me long to do the repairs because they were simple and small. This only took me two days to complete – two full, eight-hour days – because I only have 122 props in those three kits!

At this point, I’d done the easy work. Now, however, I had to figure out where to go to next; and, to be honest, I made my choice based on what I THOUGHT would be the next easiest problem to tackle. So…

Second, I decided to do the drawers. These are illusions that I’ve purchased and use for various stage shows. (Honestly, some of them I bought and can’t use, but those are a different story.) After 24 hours of work, I got that done. It turns out that I have 369 props in those bins!

Third, I went after my library of books, magazines, and ephemera. I sorted the books by topic, flagged a couple that I use on a regular basis, and pulled a couple out that I wanted to read. All told, there were 262 books, not counting magazines. I also lost count of how many days it took to complete that inventory, because of the time spent flipping through the books for new ideas.

Now, I’m down to videos – both DVDs and digital downloads – and digital documents. (Nowadays the instructions come as a PDF, not on paper!) I thought I had a few hundred of these; my computer says I have nearly 5,000! Now some of them won’t take any time at all to sort, because they’re tricks that I either know and use...or know and don’t use. Unfortunately, I have over 100 videos that are over 1.5 hours long that I have to watch before I can sort them.

All-in-all, this task is going to consume literally days of my life! In fact, it already has, and I’m assuming that it will take me most of the rest of this winter to get the whole thing done, inventoried, and ready for performance (or storage). In over 30 years, this collection that started small and innocent has ballooned into something overwhelming because I didn’t take care of each piece as I went.

And some of you are living your life like my collection.

In your life, you’ve suffered some minor hurts from family, friends, or loved ones. For the most part, these were small, easily dealt with; unfortunately they weren’t dealt with! You started to collect the injuries, both big and small; and every fight, every name-calling, every put down, and every slight became another part of your collection.

And now you’re in a program like The Trek and you have to open the doors and drawers and try to sort out a mess that you don’t even want to look at! The relationship is so damaged that you don’t even know where to begin fixing the issues. In other words, your “collection” is overwhelming.

If that’s you, you get two main choices:

First, you can continue to ignore it, hoping that it will somehow get “better”. If I did that with my illusions, how would it improve on its own? How would I know what’s broken until the moment that I decided to try to use it? How would I even know if what I had that was “good” versus “bad”?

Second, you can choose a place to start...and start. One small interaction, one small discussion, even making the comment “I felt hurt when you said that” can begin the process of change in our lives. And, if we’re safe in taking the first step, we can become more confident with taking the next one…and the next one.

Please notice that I am NOT promising you that this is an easy task! Believe me, I know this first-hand from the times when I’ve swept things under the rug and then wondered why my floor was bumpy and I kept tripping on things. (Sorry! Change in analogy there, but I hope that’s okay.)

Today, you need to decide if your collection of hurts is worth hanging onto. If not, pick a place – any place – and begin sorting out the junk. If you do, you may end up learning to enjoy the journey, rather than just trying to survive it.

- The Trek

November 15, 2023

Dealing With Illusions

By Barry Rudesill

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