Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!

Moon in The Who. I had been sequestered on The Celebrity Apprentice with all the complaining, backstabbing and phony heart-to-heart talks, and down the street came joy. Pure joy. Honest human joy personified by Teller and Blue Man Group. I started to cry.

They got to our stand, they exploded the balloon full of cash, and suddenly the air across from Madison Square Park in New York City was filled with money. Blue Man Group stayed in character and just enjoyed blowing the money around. Their joy was more important than the money or us winning our game. They were there for art and to help the cause, in that order. We all scrambled to pick up as much money as we could. Paul Sr., the reality star from Orange County Choppers, and Lou Ferrigno held people back, while Dee, Arsenio, Clay, and I tried to grab all we could. Everyone had been prepared for the money balloon exploding, but for some reason Clay was surprised and disgusted by the chaos. I was still crying with joy, and Clay was crying with pure hate and anger toward me and my blue buddies.

Some of the camerapeople, the producers, the sound people and crew ran up after the Blue Men had gone and said they had never been prouder of anything they worked on. Some of them were crying with me with joy. It made them remember why they had gotten into the arts. It was like being just a few feet from The Who while they smashed their instruments for America. They proved that art meant more than money. I’m pretty proud of Penn & Teller, we’ve done some pretty groovy stuff, but I was exploding with pride at the beauty of The Blue Man Group.

When we had the first break from the cameras, Clay was gathering evidence to take me down for this in the boardroom. He was angry and detailing the humiliation and the injuries he endured in all the beautiful chaos. He was very vague about the injuries. When I asked him if he needed medical attention, he made sure the cameras weren’t on and screamed, “I need you to shut the fuck up!” It was so easy to shut the fuck up right then. Teller and The Blue Man Group work without words and they had said more than I could ever say in defense of art. I drifted away in the NBC van, to my childhood and the moment with The Who when I understood that I needed my life to mean more than “Money, Money, Money, Money.”

The “boardroom” didn’t matter. Clay lowballed the amount of money we were able to gather, but I didn’t argue. Clay said that the Blue Man Group’s money that Clay wanted to go to our TV charity had ended up going to some homeless people. Trump joined him, disgusted by the idea that some of the Blue Man Group’s money might have gone to people who needed it instead of the people Donald Trump would get credit for giving it to who needed it. Trying to explain to Donald Trump that beauty and art can be more important than money is like trying to explain to Donald Trump that beauty and art can be more important than money. The “contest” was revealed to be very close (in terms of money, beauty wasn’t discussed) and Donald Trump tried to make me say that I regretted what the Blue Man Group had done. Clay tried to get me to say that I should have gotten the Blue Man Group to be more responsible, and by that he meant, give us more money so he could win his game.

It was during this episode that Donald Trump understood that he didn’t understand me, and feeling misunderstood by Donald Trump and Clay Aiken is its own kind of joy.

I thought about some family at home in a small town watching the Blue Man Group on The Celebrity Apprentice like I watched The Who. I thought about many children being disgusted by all that money being “wasted” on the homeless. And I thought about maybe one child all of a sudden understanding what art can mean and crying with joy.

As The Who sang, “Why don’t you all just f-f-f-fade away. Don’t try to d-d-d-dig what we all say.”

Listening to: “My Generation”—The Who

THE FOURTH OF JULY

ALL THEATER, MOVIES, LITERATURE, AND ART can be broken down into any number of plots you want. Pick an integer and someone has broken all basic plots down to that number. You can even do that Joseph Campbell monomyth jive: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” That thinking gave us the New Testament and Star Wars, and a few good things too. Plots are either infinite, with every tiny detail changing the whole thing, or it all breaks down to one plot, and that one plot is always “Things happen.” I watched the Joseph Campbell interviews and read The Hero with a Thousand Faces and all I could think of was the Bob Dylan line “At dawn my lover comes to me and tells me of her dreams, with no attempt to shovel a glimpse into the ditch of what each one means.” Campbell spends all this time abstracting plots to meet his taxonomy, and then never gives us a hint of what it tells us about being human. He’s really just saying, “things happen” and then labeling them anyway he wants.

Even the 1964 black-and-white silent movie Empire by Andy Warhol has things happen. It’s just a single shot of the Empire State Building. They shot slightly over six hours of raw footage, then slowed down the film so it ran over eight hours. The camera doesn’t move, nothing really happens. Empire State Building window lights do go off and on, and during the three reel changes you can see Andy’s reflection and the cinematographer’s before they turn the lights out in the room they’re shooting in. It breaks the fourth wall of, in this case, the Time-Life Building where the camera was set up. I loved Andy. His last on-camera appearance was in our Showtime movie Penn & Teller’s Invisible Thread. The plot of our movie was that aliens came to earth and were going to destroy all humanity unless we could prove we were unique in the universe. Andy and a bunch of others were gathered to make the case for humanity, and P&T were brought in to entertain them while they waited. After everyone else failed, we, in our cheesy way, tried to snow the aliens with a trick claiming we were using “invisible thread,” and that was unique. The aliens realized that nowhere in the universe were there creatures who would lie about something that stupid, so Penn & Teller saved the world. I sat in our greenroom area while Amazing Randi told Andy that he shouldn’t trust crystals but should go to a real doctor. I thought Randi was pushing pretty hard against an eccentric genius on an issue that didn’t really matter. If Randi had pushed harder and if the rest of us had supported Randi, if we hadn’t respected Andy’s nutty ideas so much, would Andy have lived longer? No way of knowing.

Andy was certainly a hero and had several faces of his own, most of them wig-wearing ones. He certainly ventured forth from Pittsburgh, the world of common day, into a region of supernatural wonder, Manhattan in the sixties. Fabulous forces were certainly encountered and Andy won many a decisive victory—producing The Velvet Underground’s record against record company wishes to name one stunning peripheral one. He came back from this mysterious adventure to have the Andy Warhol Museum built after his death (should we have pushed with Randi more?), in Pittsburgh and that sure is a boon to his fellow men and women. Joseph Campbell’s jive is an example of this: if something explains everything, it explains nothing. If a disease has too many mysterious symptoms, it’s probably not a real disease.

Stage magic is the idiot little brother of real theater, and there is also one mono-plot in stage magic: A loser without friends in the world of common day discovers there is no supernatural wonder, but he’s willing to lie about that. Mundane forces, like needing to get a job, are encountered and he grows out of it. If our loser sticks with magic past adolescence, the loser stays in his little dream world, playing shitty gigs and annoying women.

That’s the one plot, but there are a few basic effects actions in stage magic:

Animation—inanimate object moving, or a person levitating

Production—making something appear

Vanish—guess

Transformation—something turns into something else

Penetration—something goes into something else, sexy by definition

Teleportation—moving an object to impossible location

Escape—get out of something

Prediction—you’ll figure it out

Restoration—you fuck something up and magically fix it

A transformation is really just a vanish and an appearance of something else. A penetration is just a half