Luxe Life Blog
Gerry McCambridge celebrates 600 shows since moving to Las Vegas
Gerry McCambridge.
Photo: Courtesy
At first it was just a three-week gig when Gerry McCambridge decided to give up the tough tours on the road and settle in Las Vegas. Incredibly, the three weeks turned into more than 47 weeks, and now with his move to Hooters, he’s just racked up his 600th resident show here! Not only that, but he successfully launched an Internet site for show tickets here in Vegas, www.showtickets4locals.com, that now has 35,000 members.
Gerry and Michelle.
In 2004 the Psychic Entertainers Association honored him for “Outstanding Contributions to the Art of Mentalism,” and the following year he was named Mentalist of the Year. He’s performed Off-Broadway in New York and created and starred in the top-rated network TV show The Mentalist, which was shown in 10 overseas countries as far away as Australia, Korea, Thailand and Britain.
I didn’t even have to go into a trance to chat with him as he hit show No. 611.
Gerry McCambridge receives his Mentalist of the Year award.
Robin Leach: After 20 years of doing your act, how do you define “mentalism” after all this time?
Gerry McCambridge: Mentalism is a form of magic designed strictly to confuse you and mess with your head. There are no big illusions, there are no big boxes. It’s not a visual form of magic but an intellectual, mental form of magic. I stopped the hypnotism part of the act years ago.
RL: So give me an example of what might be your favorite moment in this long-running lifetime of entertainment.
GC: My new favorite moment is how I end the show, and basically I let everybody see that there is a big poster on stage. I hold it up so they can’t see what it is. We have 55 consecutively numbered Nerf balls. We toss them out to everyone in the audience, so a totally random bunch of people winds up with them. Across the stage, we have six basketball hoops, and the nets are tied so when one ball goes in, it just stops and it cannot accept any other balls. We tell everyone from the audience to come on up, and the first six balls in the nets are the ones we are going to use and the audience goes crazy and they’re throwing balls at each other and throwing them in the hoops.
So it’s very high in audience participation and very fun. Eventually, we have six numbered balls in the six hoops, we go down the line, and we say, OK, we’ve got 22, 18, 36, 54, 34 and 12. And then the poster is unfolded, and there are the six numbers, predicted before they even began -- in the order they chose them. So when I tell them make sure you choose the right net and make sure you take your best shot, it’s just a really fun part of the show that everyone enjoys participating in. I never get it wrong.
Gerry McCambridge
RL: I would say that’s a blow-away moment.
GC: Everybody writes down the numbers and then they go home and they play them in their local lottery or bingo or whatever because they think they are lucky. I get emails all the time, “I got my new six favorite numbers, and I’m going to win!” Nobody yet, though!
RL: How long did it take you to do that? I guess you don’t call that mentalism. I guess that’s forecasting and prediction, right?
GC: Correct. I was designing that one for about a year, trying to figure out the best way to do it. I had a bunch of different variations of it for maybe five or six years. And then quite suddenly it all came together. Nobody else does this. It is exclusively mine. I was going to do it on the show Phenomenon with Criss Angel, but NBC didn’t know whether the show was going to last six weeks or eight weeks. So if it lasted eight weeks -- that was my seventh-week routine, but we never made it that far.
Gerry McCambridge.
It’s funny because when you’re sitting in my showroom, watching everything I do show, you are convinced this has to be a stooge. There’s no way this guy can be doing it. There are no plants, no doubles and no twins or triplets!
RL: How do you find the audience at Hooters? I’m just guessing, but sometimes they must get a little wild and rambunctious?
GC: But that’s what I like. For about 20 years, when I lived in Manhattan, I used to do a lot of corporate and high-end Park Avenue and Madison Avenue gigs. Those people tend to be a little less on the reactive side. They sit there and, you know sometimes, they almost take it as an insult, like, “I have a master’s degree -- how is this guy doing this to me?” Whereas the Hooters crowds just really enjoy it, it’s the NASCAR crowd, it’s the rodeo crowd, they’re just in Vegas to have fun and let go. They really let their hair down and have a blast with it.
RL: So did you move out here just to start at the Rampart casino from back East?
GC: I was back East; I’m a New Yorker. I’ve lived there all my life except the past three years in Vegas. I have six kids, I have a lovely wife, and I was tired of traveling. I was averaging 100 one-nighters a year. So I came out to Vegas to find a place to settle down so I could be a soccer dad during the day and at night go to work and do what I do best, but then after I can come home and be with my family and tuck them into bed.
So I came out to Vegas looking for work. The first place I went was to see Mr. Steve Wynn when he was building the Wynn, but he didn’t have any room for me. So I had a shot at the Rampart in Summerlin, but they said they didn’t know how it was going to work. They gave me a three-week contract to do 12 shows, and that contract ran out lasting 49 sold-out weeks when I was offered a Strip engagement at the Stardust.
RL: How long were you at the Stardust before it was blown up?
GC: I was there for about eight months. When the Stardust closed, the Rampart folks called and said, “come on back -- we’d love to have you back.” So for me, that was an honor, went back there for a little while and then I found Hooters -- so, all in all in Vegas, I’ve just completed my 600th consecutive show.
RL: Did you start out to be a mentalist?
GC: No, I started out to be a magician at 8 years old and switched over to mentalism when I was about 24. I was traveling with a bunch of magicians. I used to be an apprentice, when I was coming up through the ranks. I didn’t like how a bunch of them hid behind what they were doing; I liked the more personality-based magic. And that’s what mentalism was, it was more adult magic. You know it wasn’t kid magic, like here’s a silk scarf and, look, here’s a dove. I wanted to find something different that intellectually stimulated people, as opposed to just visually stimulating them.
RL: And did you have a part-time job while you were a part-time magician? Did you ever have a fall-back job?
GC: Yes, I was a mechanical engineer. My mom told me that you always need something to fall back to. So while I was waiting for my magic career to kick in, you know ’cause I was married at 22, I had to support my wife and my kids. So I was an engineer up until the point where I knew that things were going so well I could quit my job.
I absolutely love it out here. I love Vegas, I love the town, I moved the entire family out, cut all ties with New York, sold my house over there, and the Vegas crowds are great. You know for years, I was doing corporate work, and when they fly me in to do a corporate, it’s usually like a three-day seminar or junket. You know they throw somebody in at the end of the night to entertain people. And a lot of them are tired, and they’ve been through meetings all day long, and they don’t want to see a goofy mentalist. Where in Vegas I have an audience of 270 every night, and they paid to come and see me! It’s different than to just be thrown into a room and say here’s entertainment for an hour. So it’s a great, appreciative crowd out here, and I really, really like it.
I’m there every night but Friday. Hooters has just moved me up, and in December I’m doing two shows a night, taking over for Bobby Slater, who is going back to California for the month. Come on in -- and I promise you total amazement.”
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