The hardest audience I have ever performed for was not a room full of skeptical executives. It was not a trade show crowd that would rather be somewhere else. It was not a conference hall of a thousand strangers.
It was six people sitting around a dinner table in my apartment in Vienna. My brother. My sister-in-law. Two close friends. My partner. And my business partner Adam, who was visiting from the States.
These people know me. Not “Felix the performer.” Not “Felix the consultant who does magic.” Just Felix. The guy who burned dinner once and blamed it on the oven. The guy who argued passionately about which coffee shop makes the best Melange. The guy who still does not know what to do when his phone freezes.
They have seen me nervous, excited, wrong, petty, generous, exhausted, and every other shade of human. They know exactly who I am. And that knowledge makes them, paradoxically, the most demanding audience imaginable — because they can detect inauthenticity with the precision of a finely tuned instrument.
The Persona Problem
When I first started performing, I developed what I thought of as my “performing self.” It was a slightly heightened version of me — more confident, more polished, more in control. The performing self had a different vocal register. A more commanding posture. A smoother way with words. The performing self was who I became when I stepped on stage, and who I stopped being when I stepped off.
For corporate audiences and strangers, the performing self worked beautifully. Nobody knew the difference. They met the performing self and assumed that was just who I was. The slight artificiality was invisible because they had no baseline to compare it against.
But at that dinner table in Vienna, surrounded by people who had known me for years, the performing self was immediately, glaringly obvious.
I was about thirty seconds into my first piece when my brother raised an eyebrow. Not at the magic. At me. At the way I was talking. At the slight shift in my posture. At the fact that I was, in some subtle but unmistakable way, pretending to be someone I was not.
He did not say anything. He did not need to. The eyebrow said it all. And in that moment, I had a choice: continue performing as the performing self and endure the silent awareness that everyone at the table could see through it, or drop the persona entirely and perform as myself.
I dropped it. And the performance got better immediately.
Why Friends and Family Are Different
Pete McCabe discusses scripting for different performance contexts in Scripting Magic, and his underlying principle is always the same: the script must serve the audience’s experience. What makes friends and family a unique audience is that their experience is filtered through deep personal knowledge of the performer.
A stranger watches a magic performance and sees a performer. Their evaluation is based entirely on what they experience in the moment. A friend watches a magic performance and sees a person they know. Their evaluation is filtered through years of accumulated knowledge about that person’s character, habits, and personality.
This means every false note is amplified. A line that sounds charming when delivered by a stranger sounds rehearsed when delivered by someone your friends know does not talk that way. A gesture that seems confident to strangers seems affected to people who have seen you fumble with your car keys. A dramatic pause that builds suspense for new audiences feels like acting to people who have watched you nervously ramble through every other conversation.
The filter of personal knowledge strips away every artificial layer and leaves only what is genuine. If the genuine material is strong, the performance is extraordinary — more intimate, more powerful, and more memorable than any stage show. If the genuine material is thin, the performance collapses under the weight of its own artificiality.
The Authenticity as Advantage
This is where the title comes from, and it took me a long time to understand it: performing for people who know you is not a handicap. It is an advantage. Because the one thing you have that no other performer on earth can offer those people is your authentic self.
Austin Kleon writes that you are a remix of your influences — that your unique combination of experiences, interests, and perspectives is, by definition, original. When you perform for strangers, they experience a portion of that uniqueness, filtered through your stage persona. When you perform for friends and family, they experience the full depth of it, because they know the context behind every reference, every joke, every personal aside.
A mentalism piece where I reference my obsession with magic history means something different to my friends than to strangers. My friends know how many hours I have spent reading about it, how many conversations I have derailed with historical tangents, how genuinely passionate I am about this subject. That knowledge amplifies the performance. It adds a layer of meaning that no stranger can access.
Similarly, a card effect where I talk about practicing in hotel rooms is not just a thematic choice for people who know me. It is a reference to real nights, real hotels, real conversations where they called me and heard the sound of cards being shuffled in the background. The performance becomes embedded in shared history, and that embedding makes it more powerful, not less.
Rewriting for Reality
After that dinner table revelation, I started a deliberate process of rewriting my material for friends-and-family performances. The exercise was one of the most instructive scripting experiences I have had.
The first thing to go was any line that I would not say in normal conversation. Every piece of “performer talk” — the slightly formal phrasing, the constructed transitions, the artfully casual questions — had to be replaced with the way I actually talk. Not dumbed down. Not sloppy. Just honest.
I found that many of my scripted lines were designed to create an impression rather than to communicate genuinely. “What I’d like to show you now” is a performer line. Nobody talks that way at a dinner table. “Check this out” is how I actually talk. The second version is shorter, more natural, and more effective in an intimate setting.
The second thing to go was any emotional register that I do not authentically inhabit. The “dramatic” voice I use to build tension in corporate settings is not how I express genuine excitement or wonder. When I am genuinely amazed by something, I get quiet, not theatrical. When I am genuinely excited, I speak faster, not slower.
I started scripting my friends-and-family material around my actual emotional responses rather than performed ones. The result was a set of pieces that felt like conversations rather than performances — which, in an intimate setting, is exactly what they should feel like.
The Dinner Table Test
I now use what I think of as the dinner table test for all my material, not just the material I perform for friends.
The test is simple: could I perform this piece at a dinner table with people who know me well, without any of them detecting artificiality?
If yes, the material is authentically scripted. It works regardless of context because it is built on genuine communication rather than performed communication.
If no, the material has artificial elements that need to be examined. Those elements might be appropriate for stage performance — some degree of heightening is natural and necessary on a stage. But knowing where the artificiality lives allows me to make conscious choices about when to deploy it and when to strip it away.
This test has improved my corporate material as well. When I removed the most obviously artificial elements from my keynote performances, the audience connection deepened. Corporate audiences may not know me personally, but they can still sense authenticity. A presentation that sounds like a real person talking is more engaging than one that sounds like a performer performing, regardless of the setting.
What Michael Close Got Right
McCabe quotes Michael Close in a way that connects directly to this topic: “If you’re not very interesting to talk to without doing magic tricks, you’re not going to be very interesting when you do magic tricks.”
At a dinner table with friends, this truth is inescapable. The magic is not carrying you. You are carrying the magic. If the conversation between the tricks is boring, the tricks do not save you. If the conversation is engaging, the tricks become highlights within an already enjoyable experience.
This realization shifted my entire approach to dinner table performances. I stopped treating them as “shows” and started treating them as “conversations with magic in them.” The magic emerges naturally from the flow of conversation rather than being presented as separate, formal performance pieces.
Someone mentions a decision they made recently, and I say, “That reminds me of something — can I show you something about how decisions work?” The piece flows from the conversation and returns to it. The boundaries between performing and socializing dissolve.
This is possible only because the people at the table know me and trust me. They are not evaluating me as a performer. They are enjoying my company as a friend who happens to have an interesting skill. The social contract is fundamentally different from a stage performance, and the scripting must reflect that difference.
The Vulnerability Dividend
Performing for people who know you requires a kind of vulnerability that stage performance does not. On stage, the performer persona provides protection. You are playing a role, and if the audience does not connect, the role absorbs the rejection. You can tell yourself that they did not reject you — they rejected the performer.
At a dinner table, there is no role. There is only you. If the magic does not land, there is no persona to absorb the failure. The friends who watched it not work are the same friends who will have breakfast with you tomorrow. The stakes feel higher because the relationship is real.
But this vulnerability pays dividends. When the magic does land — when you create a genuine moment of wonder for people who know you intimately — the reaction is deeper and more personal than any stage audience can produce. A stranger’s astonishment is thrilling. A close friend’s astonishment is transcendent. Because they know you, and they know you cannot do what they just saw you do, and the impossibility is grounded in the reality of your shared history.
My friend looked at me across the table after a piece and said, with complete sincerity, “How is that possible? I know you. I know you can’t do that.” The wonder in her voice was not the wonder of a spectator watching a stranger. It was the wonder of a person whose understanding of someone they love had just been pleasantly shattered.
That is a reaction you cannot get on stage. It is available only in the intimate context where the audience knows the performer as a real person. And it is available only to performers who bring their real selves to the table.
The Universal Lesson
The lesson from performing for friends and family extends to every performance context, and it aligns with something McCabe, Ortiz, and Kleon all touch on from different angles.
McCabe insists that scripting must come from character. Ortiz insists that the effect happens in the spectator’s mind and that personal stories create the strongest connections. Kleon insists that authenticity is the only sustainable creative strategy.
All three point toward the same truth: the most powerful performance is the most honest one.
Friends and family simply make this truth unavoidable. They are the litmus test. The detector of falsehood. The mirror that shows you exactly where your material is genuine and where it is performed.
If you can perform for people who know you, with no persona, no heightening, no artificial layer between yourself and the audience, and create genuine moments of wonder — then you have material that will work anywhere. Because what works for the most demanding audience will work for every audience.
What I Do Now
I perform for friends and family regularly. Not as practice for bigger shows — as a creative practice in its own right. These performances keep me honest. They force me to strip away the artifice that accumulates naturally over time, the little habits of heightening and performing that creep in when you spend too much time on stages in front of strangers.
Every few months, I invite people over, cook dinner — sometimes successfully — and at some point during the evening, the conversation turns to magic, and I share whatever I have been working on. Not as a show. As part of the evening. Embedded in the reality of friendship, food, and conversation.
These evenings are among the most creatively rewarding experiences of my life. They remind me why I started doing this in the first place. Not for stages and spotlights. For the look on a friend’s face when something impossible happens three feet away, performed by someone they know cannot possibly be doing what they are seeing.
Your authenticity is your advantage. Not despite the fact that your audience knows you. Because of it.
The script must be real. The performance must be honest. The person must be present.
Everything else — the technique, the method, the polish — is secondary to the truth of who you are, sharing something extraordinary with people you love.
That is magic at its most powerful. And it does not require a stage.