Michael,

Thanks for spending a week with us!

I only saw you live once, during your lecture tour in Vienna. Like many of us, I've been a student of yours for many years (I'm 25, so not THAT many years). Although I appreciate your comprehensive teachings on card and coin magic for L&L, I have to admit that I like your earlier work even better. My favorite is your book (Magic of MA) as well as the Stevens Magic video, which is wonderful. I, personally, think your cups and ball routine is maybe the best three cup routine I know.

Anyway, I wouldn't be able to describe the differences between your performance style in your beginnings and now other than in some very clumsy, second-language terms. So why not make this a question? How do you think you have changed as a performer. And - probably a difficult question to answer - do you think you did anything better 20 years ago?

Thanks for everything,

Christof

Hi Christof,

I can understand where you are coming from on this. There is a difference between the material I was working on in my earliest days and the material I felt I needed to work on when putting together the projects for L&L.

In the early days, the technical demands of a particular routine was a non-issue, because I was able to totally immerse myself with a routine for long periods of time.

With the L&L projects, we wanted to appeal to as many people as possible, so there was a limit on the sleights we wanted to require. I didn't want the material to be self working, but I knew there were a lot of people intimidated by the material that was too difficult, so it might be that this new criteria for the material I featured on the DVD's produced a noticeable difference in the end result.

As my children get older - Savannah is 5 & 1/2 and Evan is 8 months - I am able to really appreciate how much time I used to be able to devote to magic. Huge blocks of time that are currently going towards my family. So the range of material that I have really polished at any given time is much smaller than it used to be, but I'm content with the trade off, and just grateful that I had those many years when I was younger to be obsessive with magic!