Josh Beechraft Magic

My name is Josh Beechraft, I am 29 years old and I have been living in the Traverse City area for most of my life. When I am performing, many people ask me how I learned magic or how I got into it. To their surprise I tell them that I am mostly self-taught and that I started when I was 21 years old. Here is a more detailed story on how it all started.

About 10 years ago I was working in the car audio field at Kurtz Car Stereo. One of the reps. for a company who's products we were selling came in and showed me and the sales manager a magic trick.  After a brief but insistent conversation, the rep. agreed to show us how the trick was accomplished. From that moment forward I was learning magic. I knew there was a small magic shop in downtown Traverse City, so I made it a point to visit it.

Hocus Pocus was the name of the magic store and I soon became a regular. I spent a lot of time and money learning as much as I could. I bought little tricks, books and even videos on how to do magic. A few months had went by and I saw the rep. that had got me started and he was shocked at the things that I was able to do with magic.

Not long after that, I started attending seminars and conventions. This is when I realized that I was good at it, but I was disappointed because I wasn't able to learn much at that point.  Many of the people I had met or seen were either doing much of what I was or were asking me for advice. The main performers, however, were quite helpful to me and they had complemented some of my tricks.  For the most part though it was just entertaining. After that I quit going to conventions because I really had plateaued.

Next I realized that the only way to get better was to get some more experience under my belt. So I started performing professionally; up until this point it was just a occasional birthday party for a friend and social outings. This had actually went on for a couple years and I was quite scared to perform for money. You see, my initial love for magic was the technical challenge. I got good at that, but I was not a performer at all.  Now, 10 years later, I am the house magician for The Great Wolf Lodge in Traverse City and I have been there for nearly 4 years (and counting). And most recently I won Traverse City's Got Talent.

In the past 6 years, I have been performing regularly at different functions and events.  Those events include birthday parties, restaurants, weddings and even boyscout troop  and church functions. I have learned a great deal about performing and relating to people from experience.  Magic has been a huge part of my personal growth and is what I attribute most of my other success too.

Thank you for reading.

Josh Beechraft