aspect of his shows that made him unique.
However, even though working at Abbot’ s ultimately helped him with his career, he was paid less than $ 100 a week in his full time job. Mullica didn’ t care, though, because working for the magic shop allowed him to completely immerse himself in the world of magic.
“ I couldn’ t have been happier,” Mullica told The Magic News Wire.“ I’ d take home a different book every night from the showroom. I read almost every single book in the Abbot’ s catalogue, because I had access to it, and I met all these magicians in person. I’ m talking about people like Clarke Crandall and Jack Gwynne, and I met John Mulholland one time, he was in the showroom. These people aren’ t around any longer, so it was an opportunity that was just priceless to me. My salary didn’ t really matter, it was just a priceless teaching experience.”
Mullica stayed in Colon from 1971 to 1973, before deciding to move to Atlanta on the request of magician Abb Dickson, where they did mall shows together. After two years of this, Mullica went to bartending school in Atlanta, hoping to become a professional bar magician.
He got a job in a French bar and restaurant called The Abbey, where he honed his skills and practised routines that he would go on to use for the rest of his career – such as a cups and balls routine, and the Mullica wallet.
He was so successful with bar work that he decided to open his own bar, which he had custom built for him. This bar, of course, was the“ Tom-foolery Magic Bar Theater.”
He opened the Tom-foolery in 1976, and it stayed open for 11 years, closing in 1987. During that time he enjoyed massive success, and ventured into the field of ventriloquism. Using a prop rabbit which he named Duke after the Vaudevillian Duke Stern, he performed comedic ventriloquist acts and bar magic. One of his most popular acts was where he would pretend to hypnotize Duke, and make him“ levitate” off the bar.
He claimed that Duke became so popular that he became jealous of the puppet, and subsequently removed him from his shows, going back to traditional bar magic.
A unique staple of each show involved Mullica brushing his teeth in the bar sink before beginning the show, explaining that if he brushed his teeth before each show, he’ d never miss a day of brushing his teeth, since he performed shows daily. It became a kind of running gag, and a signal that the show was about to start.
During his time running the bar, he employed a total of 22 bartenders and( as he talked about in his 2015 I. B. M convention presentation entitled“ Naiveté”) every single employee was stealing from him. He made hardly any profits because of this, and he only realized what had been happening when he finally hired a trustworthy employee – Stephen Holmes, the man who would later become his husband.
At the Tom-foolery, he invented his signature act: the cigarette trick. The act came about from when he was smoking one day and wanted to try throwing a cigarette at his mouth and catching it. After some successful attempts at this, one time he missed and the cigarette went inside his mouth. Even though he“ seared the hell of the inside of [ his ] mouth”, he found it so funny that he made an act out of it.
The trick became hugely popular, earning him a guest spot on Late Night