chapter vi: agents of fortune  

myeck's acting career never took off, but his unique ability to irritate people while remaining unflaggingly pleasant did not go unnoticed. Shortly after the Dawn of Oz project fell through, he received an invitation from Irv Strock of the small but influential ATM agency to interview for a position as a talent agent.

 

Always a bit neurotic about arriving on time, myeck made a point of giving himself lots of slack in case he got lost or stuck in traffic, none of which, as it turns out, happened, and he arrived at the agency at 7:30am for a 9 o'clock appointment. Finding the front door open but no receptionist stationed out front, he simply walked into the back where he startled Strock and his partner Steve Bitner, who were not expecting anyone to be around.

 

"I felt as though I were intruding on a private moment." he would later write. Embarrassed, he muttered a hasty apology and started to leave, but the two men, having been in the talent agent business for many years, were no longer capable of feeling embarrassment and called him back in.

 

myeck's career as a talent agent was not a spectacular success. It did, however, allow him to represent "Vagaofechado Junior", actually the first cousin, once removed, of the original Vagaofechado, "the biggest little magician in the world" whom myeck always fondly remembered as Unka Bill.   Junior's shows were on a much smaller scale, owing partly to the lean pickings for magic acts in general at the time, and partly because no insurance underwriter would cover him unless he swore to never have both a pigeon and a violinist in his act. Junior's best-known bit involved his pigeon Dovey, who was trained to make a sneezing noise at certain points of the act. Junior's career ended when his entire flock of pigeons was slaughtered in a contract hit, allegedly taken out by the Violinists' Union.