We Can Stop at the Magic Store ...

Long-time couples, married or not, develop personal shorthand in their dialogs. Shared experiences that become staples. During a conversation, these make sense to them, but not to anybody outside the relationship -- unless they stop to explain.

When I was a young man living in L.A., my best buddy was a fairly serious amateur magician. He had gotten into it as a teenager, when we'd both lived in Baton Rouge, and had a pretty good collection of standard stage tricks -- linking rings, Chinese rice bowls, cabinets for making things vanish and appear, a cane that turned into a handkerchief, card tricks, even a full-dress suit, white tie and tails. It was from him that I learned old saw about how to do a stage performance: Don't think of yourself as a magician, think of yourself as an actor portraying a magician. Makes it easier to get that grand, scenery-chewing persona ...

Um. Anyway. During those years, Joe Berg had a magic shop on Hollywood Blvd. and this was the place for serious magicians to buy stuff and hang out, so sometimes we'd go there. I could do a few coin sleights, enough so they didn't kick me out. (Once, my friend and I managed to con our way into the Magic Castle in Hollywood, which was a club for professional magicians, and in those days, invitation-only. That might have been our best trick ever ...)

Our wives liked to get out now and again, but some of the places they wanted to go didn't interest us much, so we tended to drag our feet on those occasions. At some point, in a wonderfully transparent psychological ploy, my wife said to us, "Come on, go. We could stop at the magic store on the way ..."

I laughed then, and it's still funny now. It became our privatespeak for any attempt to fool each other that we caught. Uh huh. Right. And can we stop at the magic store on the way ... ?

No real point here. I just remembered it when I was fooling around with posting that coin vid. Figured I better put it down before I forgot it, in case I ever wanted to use it. This is how a writer's mind sometimes works. Odd connections that form unexpectedly.

Which, long as I am here, reminds me of another how-a-writer's-mind-works scene, from Bob Fosse's movie, All that Jazz. Joe Gideon, played by Roy Scheider, is a very thinly-disguised Fosse. He is cheating on his girlfriend, Kate, played by Ann Reinking. Who had been in real life, Fosse's girlfriend, and whom he cheated on. Talk about complicated. Reinking was gorgeous, a talented dancer, and later won a Tony for her choreography on Broadway. And she's aged very well, too -- but I am wandering. Back to the story:

Kate comes home unexpectedly and catches Joe in bed with the other woman.

During a following sequence later, they argue, with Vivaldi's Four Seasons playing in the b.g., and at one point, Joe tries to defend himself with a lame comment about giving her all he can, to which Kate's character tearfully says, "I just wish you weren't so generous with your cock!"

The look on Scheider/Gideon's face is priceless. You can see the wheels turning in his brain as he does a slow take: "That's ... good. Maybe I can use that sometime." Whereupon he stands, puts a cigarette between his lips and walks into the other room to shut off the music.

"It's show time, folks!"

Kate is essentially kicking his ass for being a scumbag boyfriend, and while trying to appear contrite, he's more delighted at the little phrase she's handed him than regretful. That's how writers are. And I'm betting that Fosse heard it directed at him and did use it when he wrote the script.

Any writer who saw that scene resonated with that line. Stuff pops up and the light goes on and you think, Wow, someday, I'm gonna find a place to use that ...

Listen for that little voice. You never know when one of those gems will just appear.