There were always crazy things. At Siegfried and Roy, a lot of their tricks were crazy. Just the levitation tricks to lift Roy off the sword. It was on a big dragon and if it malfunctions and can’t lift him off. So once there is this huge computer malfunction on stage. We were trolls. We had these hideous costumes. We had to scamper around the audience trying to entertain people why they tried to lift Roy off.

Another good malfunction stories was with a guy named Chuck Jones. He did the mis-made lady. It was the cube box where they cut the girl and move her around. I worked with him a little bit. Actually his daughter and her husband are in magic too. They were called the Magestics.

We were in Reno at the MGM Grand with a Show called Hello, Hollywood, Hello. I worked with Chuck as his assistant. The orchestra was downstairs in the basement and they watched the show on monitor. He was just playing away. Then the music stopped. He couldn’t lift Jan off the sword. It is called impalement. The music stopped and you could hear was Chuck saying “Lift! 1-2-3 Lift!” And no music was playing because in the basement they weren’t even looking at the monitors. The audience actually knew something was wrong. The way the apparatus was set up, it wasn’t convincing enough.

There is also the costume malfunction where you are doing the splits and the whole backside of your costume splits open. And we had g-strings on, so our whole butts were exposed. That was always a good one. I remember once doing the kick line at the Tropicana and I fell and went flat back. And you are all locked, so you can pull everyone with you. But they were all experienced, so they didn’t fall.

In Malaysia we had a tip-over box. It shows it empty, and then it shows it with a girl in it, then a snake, then at last a leopard. So, then we released all of this and the girl came out, the snake came out, the birds came out, the leopard came out with a bird in its mouth. And it was kind of growling. And there was blood all over the place. We thought it was funny.

A good Lance Burton story was when he was a magic act in the Follies Begere in the ‘80s, he did bird disappearance. If you know how it is done, when you go to throw it, you hide the bird and have the handkerchief show up. And he went to throw it, and the bird just dropped. And one of the acrobats, Jan Russell, went to settle it and bought one of those little plastic football helmets you get at 7-11 from the Slurpee and gave it to him as a gift.