Uh-Oh It’s Magic! Bummer, Bummer, Bummer!

One of my first tasks in my new gig was to prepare a rather large PowerPoint Presentation for the Floral Merchandisers Meeting for all of the divisions. Our Group Director and our VP had to give a presentation at this meeting, so I worked diligently with numerous animated slides (think star-wipes and spins), images, and music.

“Boring! Why am I reading about this?” I can already hear from across the interweb. Well, you see, the theme of our presentation was The Magic of Quality, and it was decided that we really had to jazz up the presentation, so I was sent off to do research.

The first thing I had to do was visit a magic store in my neighborhood. I had no idea that a magic store would be packed with customers on an early Wednesday evening, but man was it ever. I waited patiently in line while the guy behind the counter was debating the merits of various disappearing scarves.

Once I made it to the front of the line, I explained to him that I needed two tricks that could be performed by any amateur, would look good on video and, if possible, include flowers. I ended up with a color changing magic scarf (basically it’s just a scarf that turns inside out when you hold onto the one end), and a magic bouquet of flowers (you remove the flowers from the stems, push a little knob up in back, and more flowers grow out of it). I’m not a magician, so I’m not beholden to the code of don’t ever tell them how it’s done.

I was told to find some David Copperfield videos, so I dutifully fired up Google Video and found a goldmine of craptacular “magic”. Of course, everyone LOVED it.

One video had an introduction to Mr. Copperfield which we copied almost word for word, substituting quality and floral related dialogue. This script was then taken to the AV center to record, and I’ll get into details later.

One video showed a guy riding in on a motorcycle, which was then covered by a cloth by DC. Hocus-Pocus, Abracadabra, the cloth is removed to reveal two women underneath! Roars of approval came from my supervisors, who came up with a suitable substitute.

When the meeting rolled around last Wednesday, I was nervous. We had barely practiced anything at all, and we had specific stage directions, music cues, etc. that we had to nail or else we’d look like idiots.

The presentation is going ok, all of my animation and songs were spot on, so that was good. We were right after lunch so I saw numerous people straining to keep their eyes open. Towards the end we pulled off such a magic show it would have made GOB proud.

The lights go down, and they run the video of a shadowy close-up of our VP’s eyes. It camera pulls back to show our VP running the magic scarf color-changing trick. The screen then goes black for a brief moment, then a 10-1 countdown shows up on the screen.

This was my cue. As Seal’s “Crazy” (I tried to get them to play Europe’s Final Countdown) played over the speakers, I hopped on stage wearing an all-black outfit and a motorcycle helmet. In an attempt to recreate the motorcycle stunt, I rode my co-worker’s daughter’s Razor Scooter (with a large flashlight taped to the front of it) back and forth across the darkened stage. It was very unfortunate that I could not talk them into renting a Segway. I was very careful to not go tumbling over the sides or into the podium, but still have very dramatic foot kicks. I then ducked down as other co-workers came on stage with a large pink cloth. The VP snuck on stage behind the cloth they were carrying, the Group Director made some fantastical hand gestures, and the cloth was removed to show the VP on the scooter in my place!

“How did I disappear?” you may ask? I simply crawled behind the cloth when it was removed to the other side of the stage, army crawled down the stairs, and took my position to hand off the magic bouquet and receive the Razor when the VP was done with her victory lap.

Once the bouquet trick was completed, we did a trick using glowing lotion that shows up under black-lights, showing the need to properly clean floral buckets and equipment. I did actually get them to use Gorillaz “Feel Good Inc.” for this stunt, despite the fact that it had the word “ass-crack” in it.

Successfully completing the glow trick, we moved all of the props off the side of the stage for the Group Director and the VP to make some concluding remarks. The final, and most intensive PowerPoint Slides, then came up along with some music by Jennifer Hudson (I’ve been told that she was from American Idol and was in the movie Dream Girls). While some song about changing came on, myself and 3 co-workers ran out into the audiences throwing roses into the 150 people in the hotel ballroom (I had to get to work extra early that morning to manually de-throne 8 dozen roses).

We then ran back on stage with the Group Director and VP and took bows as big “Do Not” red circle with lines through them showed up over all of our store competitors.

Cheesy as heck, right? We brought the house down with a standing ovation. I have a weird job.