WHY CMR can Change Your Performing Life
I am a strong believer in Contact Mind Reading. It is one of the few things we do as performers that is as close to real mind reading as you can get. Below is a column I wrote for the PEA some time ago that detailed some aspects of my journey with CMR and how I made it work in my show.
As with all resources here, it is ONLY for the use of our members. Hope it is helpful.
I am sitting in my hotel room after a show. On Facebook today, I saw that John Stetson was staying in the Janis Joplin suite at a hotel…somewhere exotic. Seeing it made me sigh because I am sitting in another hotel room. In the middle of Saskatchewan. This place is decorated in early “non-descript.” The carpet is designed to hide stains and I suspect the guy who painted the “art” on the wall was at least color blind and certainly occupation-deluded.
I am set for the night. I don’t remember what you call the ‘big sheet on top of the bed that they never wash.’ But it is neatly folded and put on the couch. The remote control is in a zip lock bag (because I don’t even want to KNOW how many hands have touched it/sneezed on it/whatevered on it) in case I want to watch television. My wife has been called and good nights said. Now there’s just me and this computer and the quiet steady ticking of the heating system that I can’t quite get to stay at the right temperature.
I am sitting here thinking about my show. Specifically, I am thinking about my CMR routine…and how it has changed the way I perform mentalism.
CMR was certainly one of the highlights of the show tonight. I used the CFO of the corporation. He was a sharp faced little man who looked at me with patient contempt when I asked him to help me with the effect. (We’ll call him “Skeeter” to protect his true identity.)
Skeeter hid a quarter under one leg of the projector on an AV cart and he looked like something big and furry had just burrowed into his mouth when he realized he had led me right to the aforementioned quarter. There was a silent moment in the room when I lifted the quarter up, showed it to him and said “Is this it?” Then there was this rich, satisfying surprised applause.
But the performance of CMR, and the evolution of how I perform it, has completely changed the way I perform mentalism. Since I know the question burning itself into your mind is “HOW? HOW? DO TELL! Oh, DAVID…I CANNOT WAIT ANOTHER INSTANT!(!!)” let me explain.
My first hands on exposure to CMR was when Richard Osterlind invited me to attend his full day workshop in Las Vegas after a MindVention. I watched him invite one of the participants to hide an object somewhere in the room. Richard took his hand and went directly to the object.
I was skeptical. I mean hadn’t Osterlind just spent ten minutes explaining why performers take huge chances when they use stooges? Understand that it never occurred to me that he had just done this ‘for real.’ It was just TOO strong. (This idea would come back to haunt me later.)
He must have seen the expression on my face because he invited ME to be the next volunteer. You may or may not know that Richard is one of my best friends. I was his best man when he re-married his wife. But – let me be perfectly honest. I had no intention of being a stooge. If he was going to choose me, he could expect no extraordinary help.
He turned his back and I hid a pen inside the breast pocket of a suit coat hanging on the back of a chair.
I gave him no conscious cues…in fact I tried not to. But he grabbed my hand and went DIRECTLY to the suit coat. No hesitation.
I was gobsmacked. Speechless. It was one of those “Ummm…what?” moments that felt like a bowling ball with feathers doing slow rolls in my gut. It was perhaps the most incredible thing I had ever seen. Since I had been the volunteer, I KNEW I hadn’t been a stooge. But he…KNEW???
No.
Freaking.
Way.
This column isn’t about that, or how I pressured Richard into writing a book about CMR so I could read it. But it IS about the impact that book and the bigger job of learning CMR had on my performance of mentalism and – in a lopsided way – how it brought me to this exact moment of sitting in a hotel room somewhere in Saskatchewan. (Eat your heart out, Stetson…)
I tend toward the obsessive…so when I say that I studied CMR for months I really studied it. I practiced. I REALLY wanted to do this thing.
The first time I actually performed a CMR effect in a show I was terrified. It was in a hospitality suite in Calgary for a group of hard drinking insurance salesmen. One of them hid a twenty dollar bill inside the toilet paper roll in the bathroom. I found it and the room was silent for a full fifteen or twenty seconds in reverent silence…as long as you ignored the occasional burp.
But it was WORKING. It made me think of a pendulum effect…because the participants in these demonstrations have no idea why that damn thing is moving in their hands. They only know that it IS moving. (I double dog dare you to try to tell me that, from their perspective, this isn’t some powerful mojo at work…and remembering how it happened to THEM isn’t on their Highlights of My Life Mental Reel.)
My point is that I could see the potential of CMR. So, I continued to work on it in parlour settings as well as in my paranormal evenings and shocked face after shocked face told me that people were as amazed as I’d been the first time I’d seen it myself. Eventually I put it into my stage show. (I posted that story in the Raven’s Nest back in 2015.)
After I had performed it in maybe a dozen shows and my performance was no longer subject to sweaty knees and the early onset signs of pee-my-pants terror, I couldn’t help but notice that CMR was not as strong as it had been. I was genuinely baffled. After all...it is one of the few things I do in my performance that doesn't use use props or devices of any kind. I mean...c'mon! Is there a clearer TUH-DAH cue? WHY weren’t banners flying and trumpets sounding when I performed it? Where were the virgin maidens that proceeded me, scattering rose petals for me to walk upon?
I decided to take the issue to some of my non-performer friends.
You know how people ask to “see something” once they find out what you do for a living? If you are like me, you do something safe and wonderful like a Center Tear. I started doing CMR with the cold-blooded intent of finding out what people REALLY thought. I was looking for people who respected me enough to tell me the truth.
What I learned floored me. They felt CMR was TOO strong. They were convinced that it used either a) electronics of some kind or b) a stooge – instant or otherwise.
Obviously…I was doing it wrong for those assumptions to even be occurring to them. So, I took CMR out of my show and redesigned it from the ground up. I tried to see it from a spectator viewpoint. I tried to see it through my guide’s eyes. I worked to remember the powerful burst of wonder I’d felt the first time I saw it performed in Vegas.
The process took months.
First: I let the audience member decide what object to use. I made it clear that it wasn’t an item I brought into the show. I emphasized that I never touched the object and that helped alleviate any tacit suspicions that there was some sleight of hand involved.
THEN I invited my volunteer to choose someone else at random to watch them hide the object. My reasoning: there could be no question of using a stooge because I didn’t have the faintest idea who the volunteer was going to be.
This turned out to be an occasionally stupid idea when someone well into their cups…or someone terrified to be in front of other people…or the office jerk was chosen. Unlike some of you, I have never had good luck when I surrender control of volunteer selection to someone else. That idea was quickly kicked to the curb.
I wound up telling my volunteer to choose an object and not even tell me what it was. I would turn my back on the room and have a woman from the audience be my “human blindfold” and cover my eyes while the object was chosen and then hidden.
For reasons I do not fully understand (but am eternally grateful for) this flipped the switch and propelled the effect into the stratosphere.
Not knowing what the object is doesn't make the effect any harder...because the guide still takes me directly where I need to go...and it actually has a two-part reveal: finding the object AND discovering what the object is for the first time.
It allowed me to hold up the quarter tonight and ask my not-quite-sputtering volunteer (just a little uncertainly) “Is this it?”
Now it draws the gasps I was looking for...and is a powerful routine.
I love doing CMR. I love it. But tonight, I am thinking more deeply about what learning this effect has taught me as a mentalist. I don’t think anything has had a bigger impact on doing everything I do.
Let me explain: CMR only works when I pay complete attention...TOTAL focus on my volunteer. I need to be completely in tune with them. Nothing is "half way." It is a pure partnership. Broken down to its purest essence? I AM working as hard as I possibly can to truly read their mind.
If I fail to connect with my volunteer, the effect won't work. It's that simple. There is no plan B. there's no out. No "off by one." I either get it right or I fail completely.
The first few times I performed CMR I was acutely aware of the fact that missing the subtle cues the volunteer sent me would result in disaster…and the end to life on this planet as we know it. So, I entered into doing the effect feeling honestly vulnerable. There was a RISK involved in presenting it. Obviously that sense of tension (aka “impending doom”) came through to the audience and made the effect play much more strongly. When I became more sure of myself none of that existed. My experience strengthened my ability to do the effect and at the same time decreased the effectiveness of it.
The seed of good acting is causing yourself to re-experience, interpret and then re-enact what the genuine article was like when performing for an audience. I drew on that sense of ‘holy crap…I could really blow it here’ and poured it into making the performance of CMR one of the dramatic highlights of my show.
One night a few months after I was as comfortable with performing CMR as I was going to get, the thought occurred to me: “Why wouldn’t I ALWAYS feel that same sense of vulnerability, that same total focus on a volunteer when I am performing ANY effect?”
It was one of those moments that make me go “Hmmm.”
The point: If the focus required to do CMR is total…why wouldn’t my focus in reading a mind while doing a Center Tear be just as total? Why wouldn’t divining a word on MOABT be a feat that requires the same amount of metal muscle?
I KNOW what it feels like to risk complete failure in front of an audience BECAUSE I have done CMR. How then, from an audience perspective, is watching me do “Which Hand” routine any different?
I’ve wondered what it would be like to actually read another person’s mind. I’ve written about it here and elsewhere because it is in the top ten list of “Crap I Think About.” It seems logical to me that, if I truly WERE reading minds, that this ability would tend toward being capricious. I suggest that because there are significantly more dramatic possibilities in watching a performer use a power he can’t quite depend on, than watching someone who uses that same power effortlessly.
Carry that thought just a little deeper. Put yourself in one of the chairs in the audience of a mentalism show.
In the first scenario: the mentalist is glib and entertaining. This guy has no trouble at all knowing what word you are thinking of…what the number one thing on your bucket list is…the name of the first girl you kissed. And it goes on and on for an hour.
In the second scenario: you see a mentalist who is using a power he doesn’t even fully understand himself. It looks like he has no trouble connecting with some people. But he really has to work to get on the same wavelength with others. Maybe it looks once or twice like he could actually blow it…but somehow, he manages. You see the guy working hard to get the information. You see him flexing that internal muscle.
Which is more interesting to you?
Studying CMR made all of this snap into perfect focus. My friend, Eric Samuels, once told me that when he is performing he truly IS trying to read the minds of the audience members. That’s wise thinking. My mind understood it perfectly the instant he said it to me.
Learning and developing the CMR routine taught it to my heart. And that’s where all the good shows come from
As with all resources here, it is ONLY for the use of our members. Hope it is helpful.
I am sitting in my hotel room after a show. On Facebook today, I saw that John Stetson was staying in the Janis Joplin suite at a hotel…somewhere exotic. Seeing it made me sigh because I am sitting in another hotel room. In the middle of Saskatchewan. This place is decorated in early “non-descript.” The carpet is designed to hide stains and I suspect the guy who painted the “art” on the wall was at least color blind and certainly occupation-deluded.
I am set for the night. I don’t remember what you call the ‘big sheet on top of the bed that they never wash.’ But it is neatly folded and put on the couch. The remote control is in a zip lock bag (because I don’t even want to KNOW how many hands have touched it/sneezed on it/whatevered on it) in case I want to watch television. My wife has been called and good nights said. Now there’s just me and this computer and the quiet steady ticking of the heating system that I can’t quite get to stay at the right temperature.
I am sitting here thinking about my show. Specifically, I am thinking about my CMR routine…and how it has changed the way I perform mentalism.
CMR was certainly one of the highlights of the show tonight. I used the CFO of the corporation. He was a sharp faced little man who looked at me with patient contempt when I asked him to help me with the effect. (We’ll call him “Skeeter” to protect his true identity.)
Skeeter hid a quarter under one leg of the projector on an AV cart and he looked like something big and furry had just burrowed into his mouth when he realized he had led me right to the aforementioned quarter. There was a silent moment in the room when I lifted the quarter up, showed it to him and said “Is this it?” Then there was this rich, satisfying surprised applause.
But the performance of CMR, and the evolution of how I perform it, has completely changed the way I perform mentalism. Since I know the question burning itself into your mind is “HOW? HOW? DO TELL! Oh, DAVID…I CANNOT WAIT ANOTHER INSTANT!(!!)” let me explain.
My first hands on exposure to CMR was when Richard Osterlind invited me to attend his full day workshop in Las Vegas after a MindVention. I watched him invite one of the participants to hide an object somewhere in the room. Richard took his hand and went directly to the object.
I was skeptical. I mean hadn’t Osterlind just spent ten minutes explaining why performers take huge chances when they use stooges? Understand that it never occurred to me that he had just done this ‘for real.’ It was just TOO strong. (This idea would come back to haunt me later.)
He must have seen the expression on my face because he invited ME to be the next volunteer. You may or may not know that Richard is one of my best friends. I was his best man when he re-married his wife. But – let me be perfectly honest. I had no intention of being a stooge. If he was going to choose me, he could expect no extraordinary help.
He turned his back and I hid a pen inside the breast pocket of a suit coat hanging on the back of a chair.
I gave him no conscious cues…in fact I tried not to. But he grabbed my hand and went DIRECTLY to the suit coat. No hesitation.
I was gobsmacked. Speechless. It was one of those “Ummm…what?” moments that felt like a bowling ball with feathers doing slow rolls in my gut. It was perhaps the most incredible thing I had ever seen. Since I had been the volunteer, I KNEW I hadn’t been a stooge. But he…KNEW???
No.
Freaking.
Way.
This column isn’t about that, or how I pressured Richard into writing a book about CMR so I could read it. But it IS about the impact that book and the bigger job of learning CMR had on my performance of mentalism and – in a lopsided way – how it brought me to this exact moment of sitting in a hotel room somewhere in Saskatchewan. (Eat your heart out, Stetson…)
I tend toward the obsessive…so when I say that I studied CMR for months I really studied it. I practiced. I REALLY wanted to do this thing.
The first time I actually performed a CMR effect in a show I was terrified. It was in a hospitality suite in Calgary for a group of hard drinking insurance salesmen. One of them hid a twenty dollar bill inside the toilet paper roll in the bathroom. I found it and the room was silent for a full fifteen or twenty seconds in reverent silence…as long as you ignored the occasional burp.
But it was WORKING. It made me think of a pendulum effect…because the participants in these demonstrations have no idea why that damn thing is moving in their hands. They only know that it IS moving. (I double dog dare you to try to tell me that, from their perspective, this isn’t some powerful mojo at work…and remembering how it happened to THEM isn’t on their Highlights of My Life Mental Reel.)
My point is that I could see the potential of CMR. So, I continued to work on it in parlour settings as well as in my paranormal evenings and shocked face after shocked face told me that people were as amazed as I’d been the first time I’d seen it myself. Eventually I put it into my stage show. (I posted that story in the Raven’s Nest back in 2015.)
After I had performed it in maybe a dozen shows and my performance was no longer subject to sweaty knees and the early onset signs of pee-my-pants terror, I couldn’t help but notice that CMR was not as strong as it had been. I was genuinely baffled. After all...it is one of the few things I do in my performance that doesn't use use props or devices of any kind. I mean...c'mon! Is there a clearer TUH-DAH cue? WHY weren’t banners flying and trumpets sounding when I performed it? Where were the virgin maidens that proceeded me, scattering rose petals for me to walk upon?
I decided to take the issue to some of my non-performer friends.
You know how people ask to “see something” once they find out what you do for a living? If you are like me, you do something safe and wonderful like a Center Tear. I started doing CMR with the cold-blooded intent of finding out what people REALLY thought. I was looking for people who respected me enough to tell me the truth.
What I learned floored me. They felt CMR was TOO strong. They were convinced that it used either a) electronics of some kind or b) a stooge – instant or otherwise.
Obviously…I was doing it wrong for those assumptions to even be occurring to them. So, I took CMR out of my show and redesigned it from the ground up. I tried to see it from a spectator viewpoint. I tried to see it through my guide’s eyes. I worked to remember the powerful burst of wonder I’d felt the first time I saw it performed in Vegas.
The process took months.
First: I let the audience member decide what object to use. I made it clear that it wasn’t an item I brought into the show. I emphasized that I never touched the object and that helped alleviate any tacit suspicions that there was some sleight of hand involved.
THEN I invited my volunteer to choose someone else at random to watch them hide the object. My reasoning: there could be no question of using a stooge because I didn’t have the faintest idea who the volunteer was going to be.
This turned out to be an occasionally stupid idea when someone well into their cups…or someone terrified to be in front of other people…or the office jerk was chosen. Unlike some of you, I have never had good luck when I surrender control of volunteer selection to someone else. That idea was quickly kicked to the curb.
I wound up telling my volunteer to choose an object and not even tell me what it was. I would turn my back on the room and have a woman from the audience be my “human blindfold” and cover my eyes while the object was chosen and then hidden.
For reasons I do not fully understand (but am eternally grateful for) this flipped the switch and propelled the effect into the stratosphere.
Not knowing what the object is doesn't make the effect any harder...because the guide still takes me directly where I need to go...and it actually has a two-part reveal: finding the object AND discovering what the object is for the first time.
It allowed me to hold up the quarter tonight and ask my not-quite-sputtering volunteer (just a little uncertainly) “Is this it?”
Now it draws the gasps I was looking for...and is a powerful routine.
I love doing CMR. I love it. But tonight, I am thinking more deeply about what learning this effect has taught me as a mentalist. I don’t think anything has had a bigger impact on doing everything I do.
Let me explain: CMR only works when I pay complete attention...TOTAL focus on my volunteer. I need to be completely in tune with them. Nothing is "half way." It is a pure partnership. Broken down to its purest essence? I AM working as hard as I possibly can to truly read their mind.
If I fail to connect with my volunteer, the effect won't work. It's that simple. There is no plan B. there's no out. No "off by one." I either get it right or I fail completely.
The first few times I performed CMR I was acutely aware of the fact that missing the subtle cues the volunteer sent me would result in disaster…and the end to life on this planet as we know it. So, I entered into doing the effect feeling honestly vulnerable. There was a RISK involved in presenting it. Obviously that sense of tension (aka “impending doom”) came through to the audience and made the effect play much more strongly. When I became more sure of myself none of that existed. My experience strengthened my ability to do the effect and at the same time decreased the effectiveness of it.
The seed of good acting is causing yourself to re-experience, interpret and then re-enact what the genuine article was like when performing for an audience. I drew on that sense of ‘holy crap…I could really blow it here’ and poured it into making the performance of CMR one of the dramatic highlights of my show.
One night a few months after I was as comfortable with performing CMR as I was going to get, the thought occurred to me: “Why wouldn’t I ALWAYS feel that same sense of vulnerability, that same total focus on a volunteer when I am performing ANY effect?”
It was one of those moments that make me go “Hmmm.”
The point: If the focus required to do CMR is total…why wouldn’t my focus in reading a mind while doing a Center Tear be just as total? Why wouldn’t divining a word on MOABT be a feat that requires the same amount of metal muscle?
I KNOW what it feels like to risk complete failure in front of an audience BECAUSE I have done CMR. How then, from an audience perspective, is watching me do “Which Hand” routine any different?
I’ve wondered what it would be like to actually read another person’s mind. I’ve written about it here and elsewhere because it is in the top ten list of “Crap I Think About.” It seems logical to me that, if I truly WERE reading minds, that this ability would tend toward being capricious. I suggest that because there are significantly more dramatic possibilities in watching a performer use a power he can’t quite depend on, than watching someone who uses that same power effortlessly.
Carry that thought just a little deeper. Put yourself in one of the chairs in the audience of a mentalism show.
In the first scenario: the mentalist is glib and entertaining. This guy has no trouble at all knowing what word you are thinking of…what the number one thing on your bucket list is…the name of the first girl you kissed. And it goes on and on for an hour.
In the second scenario: you see a mentalist who is using a power he doesn’t even fully understand himself. It looks like he has no trouble connecting with some people. But he really has to work to get on the same wavelength with others. Maybe it looks once or twice like he could actually blow it…but somehow, he manages. You see the guy working hard to get the information. You see him flexing that internal muscle.
Which is more interesting to you?
Studying CMR made all of this snap into perfect focus. My friend, Eric Samuels, once told me that when he is performing he truly IS trying to read the minds of the audience members. That’s wise thinking. My mind understood it perfectly the instant he said it to me.
Learning and developing the CMR routine taught it to my heart. And that’s where all the good shows come from