Josh on Magic

"I don't have a specific memory of when I first got into magic, but I remember seeing magicians as a kid growing up in Maryland and loving them. My brother and I would get magic books from the library and do simple tricks for each other. Our first major trick was the old hide a carrot in your palm, cover your hand with a handkerchief, and stick needles into the carrot pretending it was your thumb. We did it to my Mom to freak her out. 

"While my brother ended up having a passing interest in magic, I could not get enough of it. I started doing shows for my family during the holidays or other family events. I used to prepare for these shows by going to the magic shop or to magic meetings. Yes, magicians have magic meetings. It's crazy, you have 50 year old men drinking beer and smoking next to 12 year olds talking about card tricks. A lot of time, the kids are the best magicians because they have nothing but time to perfect their skills. 

"At 14, I started doing magic professionally. I got my first job doing a 45 minute show for $45. I thought a dollar a minute was pretty good back then. The thing is that I was so excited that I did an hour and a half show and pulled out every trick that I knew. The local newspaper, The Carroll County Times, came and from that, I got more work. In high school, I had a show every weekend and was making more money in a weekend than my friends were making all week. I was amazed that I could do something I loved and make money from it. 

"To make my parents happy, I went to college to study graphic design, but the plan was always to do magic professionally. During college, I got involved with a start-up and then after I graduated and came to D.C., I split my time between the start-up and my magic career. D.C. is a great city for magic because there are so many meetings and conventions here that need entertainment and it is a great town for networking. Magic has always been my full-time focus, even if it was not my full-time job. At a certain point, I realized that I needed to quit my job to focus fully on my magic career. I decided that I would give myself a year to try and make it as a magician. After the first two months, I realized that I wanted to make this my life. That decision was so liberating for me. 

"People here are fascinated when I said that I am a magician. It is such an unusual profession anywhere, but especially in D.C. It always sounds like a joke. People say, 'No really, what do you do?' For me, the real pay off to magic is the reaction from people, whether I am telling someone that I am magician or seeing their response to a trick. You do the same trick you have done for ten years and every time, people are fascinated by it. It never gets old. I have also learned that the way that someone responds to a magic trick says a lot about their personality. Some people get mad at magicians when you really fool them. Not to stereotype, but these are largely lawyers, doctors, and accountants who get frustrated because they don't like not knowing how something is done. Other people are capable of not caring about how it is done and just enjoying it as a form of entertainment. Every once in a while, someone calls me an asshole, but this is the only profession where an insult is actually a compliment. It usually means, you really got me. 

"I would encourage everyone to learn a little magic. I think that just like having a joke, everyone should have a magic trick. It's a great, fun thing to know and you don't have to be a magician to do it."

You can see Josh Norris perform every Sunday night from 6-8 p.m. at the Kemble Park Tavern at 5125 Macarthur Blvd NW. See Josh perform one of his tricks on a man at a barbershop here. 

Akiva on Connecting to People Using a Dead Guy's Words

"I grew up in the near suburbs of Boston. My family would probably tell you that they had to sit through a number of my interminable theater performances when I was eight years old. When I was 15, I read "Hamlet" and it really impacted me. I think that everyone reads "Romeo and Juliet" in freshman year of high school and just blows it off because they're forced to read it. I did the same thing, but when I read "Hamlet" on my own, that made all the difference. I tore through it in three hours and wondered, ‘Does anyone else know about this Shakespeare guy? He’s great!’ Shakespeare became a real love of mine. In college, I founded a Shakespeare Theatre that performed in the dorms. People would wander up in their pajamas and watch. There was something about the words, the style, and the subject matter that just got to me, and continues to get to me.

"When college ended, I thought I would say goodbye to that part of my life, but it turned out that I wasn’t ready to be a stock broker or an English professor. I wanted to keep this as part of my life and connect with people. Strangely, I felt most connected to people using this dead guy’s words. Still, I didn’t know that one could make a career in the arts; I thought that was just for hippies.

"It was a bet that I could find someone who would hire me to work in the arts after I finished graduate school. Now I work in a giant theater, with 775 seats, putting on these plays. Working at the Shakespeare Theatre was a dream job, where I could get my arms around the historical background, the language, and the interface with the audience.

"For me, one of the most satisfying things about working here is reminding the politicians, judges, and lawyers in the audience that a lot of these plays are about them. The reason these plays have lasted is because they have these eternal questions that people are always working on: How do you make your country better? How do you lead other people? To whom do you look when you need a leader? These are the questions that people engaged in this city are answering every day.

"There was this wonderful episode from the 16th century, when Queen Elizabeth was elderly and subject to a lot of revolts and uncertainty about who was going to succeed her. Before her conspirators launched their rebellion against her, they ordered Richard II to be put on stage because it is about deposing the king. After the conspiracy failed and she learned about the performance, she apparently turned to her aides and says, 'Know you not that I am Richard II.’ That’s a wonderful story because it's about someone really getting what history and drama have to do with their life in a political situation.

"At the end of the day, the politicians and I are working with the same material. Mine is just written down and they are making it up as they go along. It's funny to me that people come over to me and say, ‘You work in theater. That's so cool!’ I am thinking, yeah, but you are running the country. That’s pretty cool, too!"

Akiva Fox is a literary associate at the Shakespeare Theatre.

Sandy on Playing a Part in Something Bigger

"I first came to D.C. in 1991. I really just fell in love with the city. Before D.C., I was working in a costume shop in Philadelphia. When I came here, I worked at Backstage when it was still in Dupont Circle. Eventually, we moved to a bigger space in Southeast and then I bought the store from the original owner. Before us, there really wasn't a supply house in the District of Columbia for either theater books or dance wear. We are also one of the few places where you can do custom costume orders. You can come in with a sketch and we will build it. 

"Theater and art are things that I have always loved. I also did a bit of acting, but I stopped because I got too nervous at auditions. My love for costume design really picked up in college where I was able to combine my love of sewing with learning about the historical components of how things were made and the materials that were used at different times in history. 

"In D.C., I have gone in directions I never thought I would go into with costume design, like working with lobby groups. These groups usually do not want the kings, queens, and renaissance style costumes I thought I would do when I first got into this business. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals asked us to make a broccoli costume. An environmental lobby group had us build smoke stack and tree stump costumes. Another group had me make large hamburgers and huge pill capsules stuffed with styrofoam pellets, as they were picketing places that used meats with antibiotics. Now, a couple of those restaurants say they will not use meats that have antibiotics anymore. I am proud of things like that. I feel like I played a part in something bigger. 

"With costumes, I think that when people wear them, their personality can change. But I also feel that a lot of times, their personality has been there the whole time and they just don't let it loose. In this business, I learn a lot about people and their behaviors. I can usually tell how long a couple has been together when they come in.  A lot of newer couples want matching costumes where even the fabric has to be the same. Whereas couples that have been together for years are okay for one to go as Elvis and the other to go as a clown. They don't have to match because they are more secure in their relationship. It is fun to figure people out through working in this business. There is definitely a psychology behind costumes."

Backstage is located at 545 8th Street Southeast. 

Sheldon on His Mom's First Visit to D.C.

"I grew up in South Carolina. I've been in Washington for nine-and-a-half years. I think that one of the largest motivating factors for me to move to D.C. was spread somewhere between personal and career motivations. You know, I am an openly gay black male and I spent most of my time, up until that point, living in the rural south. I knew that there was a limit to my own personal quality of life and development down there. Unfortunately, that is just the way that life down there is structured. So, I wanted to explore that part of my life in D.C. In terms of career, the pace down there was much slower. Things like actualizing a career take a long time. I was working for an organization where my next move up would have had to depend on the death or retirement of the person above me. I just didn't have the energy to wait for twenty or thirty years for a promotion. On the other hand, it can also be faster down there as people get married and have kids earlier. I'm 33 and most of my friends have kids who are about to enter middle school.

"When I first moved here, I lived in Alexandria, Virginia, and worked as a psychotherapist with sex offenders. Living and being in this area was like a gateway to so many different worlds that I never saw in South Carolina. With time, I saw the writing on the wall that therapy was not the path for me. I did some work in the fashion industry and then started performing and acting while waiting tables. Now, I work at restaurant Marvin. I did my first show in 2007. At that point, I was in between directions in life between activism and performing. The juxtaposition of the two forced me to do my activism through performance. My first show was a one-man performance called Faggot. The show was about my relationship with that word growing up in the south. It was also about how that word can have a potentially deadly impact with the growing level of youth suicide related to sexuality. In 2009, I got back on the performance track and performed a narrative about the two halves of my life: growing up in rural South Carolina looking for a man as a father figure and then moving to D.C. and looking for a man as a partner. For me, it is a very necessary and personal exercise because I wanted to deal with the honesty of my own story so that I could go on and tell the stories of others, no matter how painful it may be. A lot of this story was about my own family and my relationship with my mother.

"My mother only fairly recently came to terms with my sexuality. We had the first conversation about my sexuality in 2001. It was a very challenging conversation for her. She had her ideas of what it meant to be gay. Growing up in the rural south, she had a very narrow view that gay people ended up alone and in institutions. I always tried to encourage my Mom to come up to Washington D.C., and see for herself, but just was never interested. I knew that it was largely because she was not settled with my sexuality.

"But, in 2008, she came to me and said, 'I'm ready.' I had already been up here for eight years and I knew what that meant. My mother is not a very expressive person, but she was ready to see what my life was really about here. She came up here and saw my life and met all my friends: gay, straight, black and white. I really showed her the diversity of this city and of my life. She was so taken aback. She could not stop talking about how much she enjoyed herself in Washington D.C. I think that me being in this place offered her tremendous comfort. Being a therapist, I understand the complexity of parents having to deal with a child who is gay or in any way different than they intended them to be. All parents really want is for their children to be happy. If her understanding of gay life was a very miserable existence, why would she want that for her child? When she came here and saw that was not the case for me, I think she was settled with it. But, she never said anything or asked, it was just understood. A month later on the phone, she asked if I was gay. I said. 'Yeah, absolutely.' At the end of the conversation, she took a big sigh of relief. One of the most comforting things that my mother ever said to me, remember she is not a very expressive person, was, 'You seem to be doing very well in Washington. You are surrounded by a lot of people that really like you. I am happy for you. So, do you have a 'friend'?' That was a really big step for us. She's been back to Washington, D.C. two times since and we talk two-to-three times a day. Now, every time she's here, she wants to spend more and more time with me in Washington."

Amy on Storytelling

“I am third generation DC. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a comedian. My idol was Carol Burnett. I did improv for a while with Washington Improv Theater and taught a couple of courses there. One night, I ended up going to see the Washington Storytellers Theater, that is what SpeakeasyDC used to be called. The event was an open mic storytelling night. It seemed quirky and the perfect thing for what I was interested in. There was a smattering of people and a mix of stories. My roommate noticed that I was going to the open mic nights a lot and saw that they were looking for a program assistant so she suggested I apply. I took the job and hated it at first, but now I love it.

“DC's one of the biggest theater towns, but the city mostly puts on plays. Whereas in New York, Chicago and LA, there is more experimental and smaller theaters for people to do whatever the hell they want. So, I think that the bar is high to get on stage in DC between the artist and non-artist. You are either a consumer or a creator. Storytelling, the way that we do it, shrinks that gap. Any person who walks in off the street can tell a story. We will help them do it. I can’t tell you how many people come over and thank us for helping them explore their artistic side. All day, they are in a government office or a contract lawyer looking at documents and this is one of the only creative outlets that they have found. It is not the only one available of course, but everyone has stories. We help people here share those stories.

"My DC story that I like to tell on stage is about being different. I was working in a miserable cubicle downtown. It was draining my soul and I was trying to figure out what to do. I would spoon confectioners sugar from the box just to keep alive. I walked out one day and saw this tall guy in pink spandex with yellow headphones running backwards while spinning around and screaming as he ran into oncoming traffic. I was like, 'Oh my God, that guy is crazy. I want to be crazy like that, too!' I was in a suit and pumps and I was frozen watching this guy thinking, how can I be that guy. This cop came over to me and said, 'Yeah, that's Cedric. He's as sane as you and me. He's an accountant.' See, that's good crazy, someone who doesn't care and just does what he wants to. I was going to put on pink spandex and meet him one day, but there is no way that I could keep up. The moral of the story is that he makes that choice to be himself here. He is unafraid of looking like a crazy person in the heart of downtown DC by doing what makes him happy. At that time, I was walking around DC in a constant cubicle. That guy really inspired me to pursue what I wanted to do and be more crazy in my life."

Find out more information about telling a story, hearing a story and learning about storytelling through SpeakeasyDC here.