The Eighth Strategy: Overcome And Prevail
THE EIGHTH STRATEGY: OVERCOME AND PREVAIL
Never, never, never give up.
—Winston Churchill
Scene: This really happened. Lance Burton achieved the accolade reserved for the greatest of Las Vegas headliners: his own stage in his own theater. The first American to win the Gold Medal awarded by the Fédération Internationale des Sociétés Magiques—the “Olympics of Magic”—in 1982, Burton is performing on his stage in his theater at the Monte Carlo Hotel when, suddenly, one of his comely assistants is menaced by what can only be described as a man-monster.
The masked being brandishes a sword—prompting Burton to interrupt his show, grab his own trusty blade, and engage in an apparently impromptu Errol Flynn-style duel. There is thrusting, parrying, and the discordant clash of real steel against real steel. Clearly, Burton is battling for his theatrical life, conducting a brave fighting retreat up a staircase and taking his stand at the top.
“What do you want?” he demands of the apparition. “Why are you here?”
With this, Burton covers himself with a floor-length cloth, through which we still hear him asking questions. Unimpressed, the man-monster viciously stabs through the cloth several times. He then pulls his sword back, looks around, and finds—well, nothing at all. In obvious confusion, the masked apparition turns to the audience, as if appealing to them for the explanation he cannot discover on his own.
He glares at the audience through his mask. At length, his hand reaches for it, and slowly, ever so slowly, he removes it to reveal at last the answer to the magician’s final question: “Who are you?”
He is Lance Burton—having overcome and prevailed against—and changed places with—evil incarnate.
As for the audience, it is transformed into one great eruption. And the legendary magician Jay Marshall, who appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show no fewer than fourteen times, pronounced it “The best one-man illusion in the history of magic.”
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