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I guess that every magician's worst nightmare would be performing a show and seeing everything go wrong. That's what happened to me last night, now I've had the occasional effect not got to plan before but last night it was the entire performance.

It was a safari themed performance as part of a variety show and started out with a tossed out deck style routine, psycologically forcing an animal. I pick 10 memebers of the audience and the premise is that I transmit an animal to each of them. Now I usually expect one or at worst two misses which is fine but when my first two audince members were misses things weren't looking good. Two more misses and I finally managed a hit, to cut a long story short I only got two hits out of ten. Oh well, no way out of that so I just made light of the whole thing and had a laugh about it and moved onto the last part of the performance. Sticking to the idea of travel I had four members of the audience come up on stage, take a map and draw circle around any country that they'd like to visit. The maps were shuffled up and I was into a sneak thief routine with them, giving the audience a story about how different types of people choose different places to go on holiday. Ok so the first map, this was made very easy for me as the spec had used his own blue ball point pen to mark the map and not the black marker I'd given him. I guess I could have taken the applause when I named the correct volunteer but saw the chance for a laugh so admitted what had happened (I also thought that would strengthen the rest of the routine). Number two I actually managed to get correct, onto number three. "you look like an adventurous person, blar, blar you'd probably choose Thailand", "nope not me" was the reply. A overly puzzled look to the audience had them laughing but as it's a sneak thief routine I could recover it quite easily by naming the country that they had chosen and marked on the map that I hadn't yet seen, right? Nope it was then that I realised that I'd managed to forget what that was (I don't know how many times I've done this routine and I've never done that before). Nothing left except to make a few more jokes, send the specs back to their seats and slope off stage to lick my wounds.

After the show a couple came up to me and in total seriousness told me how they'd really enjoyed my show and thought that I was one of the best comedians that they'd seen for a long time, they honesty believed that I was some Tommy Cooper style comedian and everything had been planned. Talking to the organiser later, he also said how much people enjoyed the performance. So if things do all go wrong, don't worry about it because if you're having fun then so will the audience and that's the most important thing.

I'm still baffled over how I managed to mess up the third person in the sneak thief routine though, the maps were marked and I'm obsessive about checking the order they start in.

Thanks for sharing that, we all get those disasters so it's good to hear how you dealt with things.

The more I think about it, the more I'm thinking about putting together a comedy routine. It's something that I've never done before and it might be good fun.

And the lesson here to all is that it really is all about the performance. Even when it all goes south a good performer still gets the applause. Excellent work.

The second lesson is never really tell the audience you made a mistake, at worst as in your case they may think it is all part of the routine in which case you are the hero.

Third lesson? It is not the end of the world, it is a magic show, pick up the pieces and keep moving forward.

Thanks for sharing it is always nice to know it happens to everyone.