I want to tell you about a woman named Mary Ann Smith, and I want you to understand that this story is not mine. I read about her in Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment, and it has lived rent-free in my head ever since.
Weber describes an investment conference where the attendees were several hundred high-powered business people — exactly the kind of crowd I know well from my consulting work. Sharp, impatient, accustomed to filtering out noise. These are not easy rooms.
On the first evening, a professional close-up magician performed for the group. He was in costume. He had the tools. He had the technique. And according to Weber, the room ignored him. Not rudely, exactly, but with that polite disinterest that is somehow worse than open hostility. He had mystery, and props, and skill — and the room did not care.
The next morning, a woman named Mary Ann Smith took the stage. She was a government policy analyst. She was, in Weber’s description, frumpy. She had no props. She had no tricks. She had no entertainment background whatsoever. She was there to talk about SEC regulations.
And she held that room of several hundred executives so completely that the speaker who followed her — former President George H.W. Bush — opened his remarks with: “Wow, that’s a tough act to follow.”
A government regulator. Talking about policy. Following a professional magician who had all the tools. And the former president of the United States acknowledged that she was the tougher act.
That story restructured how I think about everything I do on stage.
The Magician Who Had Everything Except the Thing That Mattered
Let me be clear about what the magician at that conference had. He had technique. He had props. He had professional-grade material. He had the costuming that signals “I am a performer.” He had, in other words, everything that most of us assume makes a performer effective.
What he did not have — what Weber identifies as the critical gap — was connection. He was performing AT the audience rather than WITH them. He was demonstrating skill rather than creating an experience. He was focused on the mystery rather than the entertainment.
Now, I have been that magician. Maybe not at an investment conference, but in spirit, absolutely. In my early performing days, I was so consumed by the technical demands of what I was doing that I forgot to be a person. I forgot to talk to the audience as human beings. I forgot that the reason anyone watches a performer is not to witness competence but to feel something.
The magician at Weber’s conference was competent. But competence without connection is a tree falling in a forest. Technically it makes a sound. Practically, no one hears it.
What Mary Ann Smith Had
So what did this SEC regulator have that the professional magician lacked? Weber breaks it down, and every element is a voice and delivery lesson.
She had sincerity. She cared about her subject, and that caring was audible. Not in a performative way — not in the way that speakers sometimes manufacture passion by raising their volume and widening their eyes. In a genuine way. The kind of sincerity that comes through in the tone of someone’s voice when they are talking about something they truly believe matters.
She had timing. Not comedian timing, but conversational timing. She knew when to pause. She knew when to let a point land. She knew when to speed up and when to slow down. The rhythm of her delivery had texture and variation and life.
She had humor. Not jokes. Not rehearsed bits. But the natural humor that arises when someone is fully present and willing to acknowledge the reality of the room. She was funny in the way that the most engaging dinner party guest is funny — not because they prepared material, but because they are paying attention to the moment.
She had enthusiasm. And enthusiasm, when genuine, is almost impossible to resist. When someone stands in front of you and radiates authentic excitement about what they are sharing, your brain responds. It is contagious. You lean in because they are leaning in. You care because they care.
She had surprise. Not magical surprise — intellectual surprise. She said things the audience did not expect. She took her dry subject and found angles that made people sit up. The unexpected is inherently engaging, and she delivered it not through tricks but through insight and framing.
And above all, she had a voice that communicated all of these things. Her voice was her instrument, and she played it with more range, more color, more dynamic variation than the magician who had every prop in the world.
The Voice Does Everything
This story haunts me because it exposes a truth that I think many of us in the magic world resist: the voice is the primary instrument of performance, and everything else is secondary.
Props are secondary. Methods are secondary. Costumes are secondary. The deck of cards in your hand, the mentalism props on the table, the stage setup, the lighting — all of it is secondary to what your voice is doing.
I know that sounds extreme. And I am not saying those things do not matter. They matter. But they matter less than the voice. Because the voice is the channel through which the audience receives everything else. It is the medium through which all other elements are filtered. A brilliant effect delivered in a flat, monotone voice becomes a flat, monotone experience. A simple conversation delivered with a voice that has range, warmth, timing, and sincerity becomes magnetic.
Mary Ann Smith had nothing. Nothing except a voice and the willingness to use it fully. And she outperformed a professional magician who had everything.
My Own Mary Ann Smith Moment
I had a version of this realization at a corporate event in Graz, though it took me a while to understand what I had witnessed.
The company had hired two speakers for the evening. The first was a motivational speaker — the kind with the wireless headset and the practiced stage moves and the audience participation games. He was polished. He was professional. He was, by any standard metric, good.
The second was the company’s own CFO. She was not a professional speaker. She had no stage training. She stood behind a podium with notes, and she talked about where the company had been and where it was going.
And the room came alive for her in a way it had not for the professional speaker.
Not because her content was better. Not because she had tricks or techniques or stage presence in the conventional sense. But because she talked to the people in that room as if she knew them — because she did. Because her voice had the quality that no training can fully manufacture: genuine human connection, delivered through a voice that was unafraid to be itself.
She paused when she felt something. She sped up when she was excited. She lowered her voice when she shared something vulnerable. She laughed at her own stumbles. And the room, hearing a real person being real, gave her their full attention.
I watched this from the side of the room, where I was waiting to perform next, and I thought: I need to be more like her and less like the guy with the wireless headset. I need my voice to sound like a person talking, not a performer performing.
The Application for Magic
So what does the Mary Ann Smith story mean for someone who performs magic and mentalism?
It means that your voice work is not optional. It is not the finishing touch you add after you have perfected everything else. It is the foundation on which everything else rests.
It means that sincerity beats polish. A voice that sounds like it means what it is saying will always outperform a voice that sounds like it is reciting a script, even if the script is brilliant.
It means that connection trumps mystery. The audience would rather feel connected to you than puzzled by you. They would rather feel that you are sharing something with them than demonstrating something at them. And the voice is the primary vehicle for that connection.
It means that the dynamic range of your voice — the variation in speed, volume, pitch, and tone — is more important than any single element of your performance. A voice that moves through a full range of human expression keeps the audience engaged in a way that no trick, no matter how impossible, can sustain on its own.
And it means that you do not need to be a natural speaker. Mary Ann Smith was not a natural speaker. She was a government analyst. But she was authentic, and she cared, and she let those things come through in her voice. That is not talent. That is willingness.
The Hardest Lesson
Here is the hardest lesson the Mary Ann Smith story teaches, and it is the reason I keep coming back to it:
A professional magician with years of training and a bag full of impossibilities was outperformed by a woman talking about government regulations. Not because she was more entertaining in the conventional sense. Not because SEC regulations are inherently more interesting than magic. But because she used her voice to create a human connection, and he did not.
That means the differentiator is not what you do. It is how you do it. And the how lives, more than anywhere else, in the voice.
When I perform now, I try to remember Mary Ann Smith. Not the details of her presentation — I never heard it. But the principle she represents. The principle that a voice fully deployed, with sincerity and variation and genuine human warmth, is the most powerful instrument available to anyone who stands in front of a room.
I have props and methods and years of practice. She had a voice and something to say.
On any given night, I am not entirely sure which of us has the advantage.
The Test
If you want to know whether your voice work is where it needs to be, try this: perform your material with no props. No cards, no envelopes, no mentalism tools. Just stand in front of someone and tell them the story of what your routine is about, using only your voice.
If the story is engaging — if they lean in, if they respond, if they care about the outcome — then your voice is doing its job, and the props will amplify what is already working.
If the story falls flat — if their eyes wander, if they check their phone, if they politely wait for you to finish — then no prop in the world will save you. The foundation is missing.
Mary Ann Smith could not have held several hundred executives with a weak voice. She held them because her voice was the strongest instrument in the room.
The question, for every one of us who performs, is whether our voices can say the same.