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Well so far I have found out that he is a "sociable, warm and witty personality" I am afraid I haven't seen much evidence of it on this forum but no doubt still waters run deep.

I shall continue to explore his website. I am beginning to think he is indeed a foreigner because of the bad spelling on his website. I am not trying to be critical. Only helpful. So far I have seen the following words spelled wrongly. Conjuring. Sociable. There was one more but I have forgotten what it was. I do think he should go over it with a fine toothcomb and sort it out. Master showmen should be able to spell properly.

Ah yes. The other word was "tremendously"

Oh dear! The spelling mistakes are more numerous than I thought. There are many, many, many of them. He really should do something about them. They are scattered throughout the site. Again I am not being critical. I am trying to help. He will thank me for pointing it out once he sorts it out.

But to deal with his points. A psychic reader should NOT put on an act. He should be genuine. All that nonsense about pretending to go into a trance or pretending to contact dead people is outright fakery. If you are a psychic under no circumstances should you be a showman when doing readings. I am a master showman when not doing readings but you have to drop all that nonsense once you actually start the reading otherwise you are just a fake.

However when you perform on stage you should indeed be a showman. You should also be an actor. However taking formal training is not the way to do it in my view. Trained actors usually forget the audience. They try to be perfect instead of trying to be human. They forget that faults are of no importance. It is lack of virtues that do you in.

As for magicians who can't perform well on the magic castle I regret to say that it happens all the time from what I hear. And commercial success has nothing whatever to do with business success or how famous you are. If you don't agree with that then you need to read Fitzkee who said exactly the same thing. Mind you Fitzkee took acting training too and of course despite his great advice didn't do very well as a professional magician so had to give it up. However he did say in his book that being a good performer had very little to do with whether you were working or not. For example you might know the right people , or may be good at the business side of things or whatever the reason is.

As for learning to be an actor my definition of actor is different from this young man's. You can be a brilliant actor without taking acting lessons. The only thing theatrical training will give you perhaps is tips on stage movement but since 90 percent of performing professionally nowadays isn't on stages anyway there ain't much point to it.

A good close up magician should be a good actor but he certainly shouldn't take up acting classes to do it. It wouldn't help him a bit. A good children's entertainer will find that his theatrical training won't help him if the kids are marauding his performing area and breaking his props.
And a good stand up worker probably hasn't taken drama classes either. I bet Paul Daniels hasn't and before he went to seed he was very hard to beat. Tommy Cooper was the greatest comedy magician of all time and I bet he didn't take drama lessons either.

But we are supposed to be talking about this Nelms book. Give me one sentence from the book that has great wisdom. I don't remember a single one. And I bet our hermit like seer who can't spell doesn't remember a single one either.

I think Mr. Lewis makes some rather good reading on this forums sometimes.

I agree when you say that showmanship can't be learned in an acting class. You have to learn it from experience you have to relax and sell yourself to the audience, not just your tricks.

Perhaps I didn't make it clear earlier on with the words EEE and NUFF, my apologies, I was trying to be tactful. However I see I must make it beyond doubt. TM will not put up with personal remarks between members which lead time and time again to ripostes and angry insults. From now on there will be no more tactful moves, posts will be deleted, access to the restricted areas will be removed and if necessary, members will be excluded from TM. The full title of this forum is Talk Magic so how about we do just that?

Thread locked.