“What, are you some kind of mind reader?” Actually in the case of this week’s profile, Bob Lawson, the answer is yes.
Lawson is an entertainer and professional mind reader who will perform at Philly Pride on Sunday. A two-time winner of the New York Cabaret Society Award for Best Variety Act of the Year, Lawson contributed many of his original thoughts and ideas to the hit CBS show “The Mentalist” and is a professional member of the Psychic Entertainers Association. When asked what to expect during his performance, Lawson will tell you: “The impossible.”
PGN: Hi Bob! BL: Hello from my home in sunny Florida! It’s 80 degrees and fabulous here.
PGN: I’m jealous. Tell me a little about yourself. BL: I’m originally from Syracuse, N.Y.
PGN: Oh, so you’ve been through cold weather. BL: Oh yes. And I really don’t miss it. My brother still lives in New York and I’ve worked the New Jersey State Fair a few times. Even being there in September, the joints started aching from the cold and damp and I remember why I moved to Florida! But Philadelphia is such a beautiful part of the world. People don’t realize how nice an area it is. You have the city and all the museums and historical areas and you have Fairmount Park, and just outside the city are beautiful farmlands and Valley Forge Park. People have no clue.
PGN: So tell me about your family. BL: I have two brothers. The one in New York and the other lives here in Florida but we’re not so close; he lives a mile away but we haven’t spoken for five years. My sexuality seems to be a problem for him along with some other family drama. My husband Mark and I have been together … it’ll be 35 years in August. [Laughs.] I tell people I was 9 and he was 11 when we met! We weren’t quite that young; I was 20 and I’d just gotten out of the Navy. I went to Provincetown on vacation and we met in a laundromat. Somewhere between spin and rinse, I knew he was the guy I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. I guess it was one of those ESP gifts that I have, I could immediately envision our happy future. Mark truly completes me as a man and in every aspect of my life.
PGN: When did you get married? BL: Well, when we do the New York State Fair we usually visit my brother up in Syracuse and stay nearby for a long weekend. Four years ago, we were driving with my brother and his wife and he said, “If you come next year we should do a weekend in Canada.” I jokingly said, “Sure, and while we’re there, Mark and I can get married!” My sister-in-law got all excited and said, “Would you? I would love that!” Well, there was no turning back after that and we started planning. It was a small wedding but beautiful. We got married on Lake Niagara and they stood up for us. I think we did it more for them than for us, but it was lovely and now I love saying “my husband.” We’d never used the term before, he was always my partner or my lover. At first as we got into bed I’d jokingly say, “Goodnight my husband,” and he’d say the same and we’d giggle, but now I can’t imagine referring to him as anything other than my husband. It’s very nice, very nice.
PGN: And your parents? BL: Both second-generation Italian. They owned a really lovely restaurant on Oneida Lake in Cicero, New York. I lost my dad about 10 years ago and my mother lives near us in Florida. My dad and mom loved Mark from day one but at the time we never felt the need to come out to them, it just was what it was. Until we started volunteering at Francis House in Tampa. There was an older Cuban woman who lived there whose son was gay. It was during the early stages of the AIDS epidemic and she had lost her son. We never met him but he was working on a project to get the Empire State Building lit up in lavender to commemorate World AIDS Day. He was too ill to go to the building but his mother got … Sorry, I get choked up every time I talk about it. She got a hotel room for him overlooking the Empire State Building so that he could be there when they lit it up in lavender. He died a few days later. So she said to me, “I’ve met your mom and dad and they’re very sweet people. But they’re getting older, so whatever you do, don’t let them leave this world without knowing completely who you were.” So, I came out to them. My dad’s answer was “I love you both and that’s all you need to know,” and then we never discussed it again. We’re very close to my mom. We all attend Mass together every Sunday at a Franciscan center. It’s primarily for the LGBT community and my mother calls everyone there the rest of her children. They treat her like a surrogate mother.
PGN: So what were you like as a kid? BL: I loved school, which I guess is odd for a kid. I loved gym, which I guess is how I knew I was gay! Get your mind out of the gutter, it wasn’t so much because of the showers, it was for the camaraderie with all the guys in baseball and football. My women friends say I’m so much into sports I’m part lesbian! I loved high school and college because I loved learning about what made people tick. That’s partly why I do what I do today. I was also into theater and was lucky enough to be involved with the Famous Artist series in New York. It was amazing; all of the TV and movie stars would be off in the summer, so they’d want to get back on the boards to keep their acting skills sharp. They’d star in a show that would travel around the country and they would have people like me, called the apprentices, to play the minor roles. I got to work with some amazing people and remained friends with a lot of them. I have about 50 photos in my office of people I’ve worked with: Elizabeth Taylor, Vivian Vance, Tony Randall, William Bendix, Bette Davis. Unfortunately, so many of them have passed, on Mark now calls it my wall of death! But what a wonderful gift it was to have worked with them and have those memories. Joan Fontaine — Olivia de Havilland’s sister — and I still keep in touch. We’ve been friends since I was 16 years old. She lives in Carmel, and Mark and I have been out to visit a number of times. She keeps saying, “You’re my oldest friend,” and I keep telling her she needs to rephrase that! She’s good friends and neighbors with Doris Day so we’ve become friends with her too. They were from the time when stars were really stars. They were professional and glamorous but they were real people too. I remember Vivian Vance, who played Ethel on “I Love Lucy,” came to do a show. We were striking down the set of the show that was up before hers and it was about 4 a.m. The previous show had starred Guy Madison,who you are probably too young to remember — I Googled your bio before you called me — anyway, he was the star of the TV show “Wild Bill Hickok” (and really handsome). His set was huge and it took us all night to pack it up. We were exhausted and she stopped in on her way from the airport to the hotel to check out her set. We hadn’t even started putting up her show yet and she knew we were in trouble, so here she was, Ethel Mertz/Vivian Vance, in dungarees and a sweatshirt, helping us build sets at 4 in the morning! That’s class, a real star.
PGN: What a great experience. BL: And it gets better! I’d been there 18 hours and left the theater to go take a nap. The Famous Artists had rented a school for the show and the nurse’s office had a cot in it so I laid down for a quick nap. Around 7 in the morning, I woke up as the sun started to shine in the window. I suddenly realized that I wasn’t alone on the cot. I turned over and was nose to nose with Vivian Vance. The nurse’s office was supposed to double as the stars’ dressing room so I said, “Oh Miss Vance, I’m so sorry! I was so tired, I just meant to sleep for a little while. I’m so sorry!” She put her arm around me and said, “Yeah, I’m tired too so why don’t you just shut up and go back to sleep.” So my claim to fame is that, at 16, I slept with Vivian Vance.
PGN: And how did you get to what you do now? BL: Well, I did some other theater and some small movie and TV roles. But I always knew that there was something there as far as … I don’t really like putting a label on it, but psychic phenomenon, ESP, mentalism, whatever you want to call it. It’s something that I think we all have, just some stronger than others. From early on, I used to play a game with my ex-brother — I spy with my little eye. He’d think of something in the room and I’d have to guess and vice-versa. I’d always guess what he was thinking right away and it would really piss him off. The more it aggravated him, the more I wanted to get it right, so I tried to develop it.
PGN: I read that you were called an illusionist. BL: No, I don’t like to use that. And I don’t like to use the word magic either, because that implies trickery. I may use psychology, body language, just reading the tone of someone’s voice, etc., but I don’t use trickery. In psych terms, they call it leakage. Unless they’re pathological liars, most people cannot lie without giving themselves away somehow. In our show, I may use a little manipulation to get someone from point A to point C, but there’s never any sleight of hand or plants in the audience, it’s all genuine. I don’t like to use the term mind control, but in a way that’s what we all do. I mean, look at the PGN. You open it up and it has ads for things you want people to buy, it’s a form of mind control. We’re subjected to it every day. It’s not harmful in our show, we don’t hypnotize people to make them do crazy things. It’s light and fun. I use a lot of humor. If I just went out there and said, “OK, you’re thinking of a clock” — snooze. How would that be entertaining? Sometimes I go to other mentalists’ shows at our conventions and it’s like watching paint dry. We predict things and read minds and that’s about it, so you need to find a way to make it entertaining. We’re not magicians, and I don’t really like to talk about them. Mentalists and magicians don’t get along very well. Mainly because mentalists get paid more and we don’t have to do children’s parties! But with them, it’s all about the trick and people know that. But with us, 99 percent of what we do is not a trick and it’s not magic and it doesn’t always work. It’s not exact science: I may get someone who’s a pathological liar and I can’t read them. Or someone who’s on stage who wants you to fail. That’s why I hated doing colleges, you always had some wise guy who wanted to try to screw with you and say you were wrong even when you were right. But what can you do [laughs]— you can’t call them a lying little bastard on stage! But we have ways of handling it and fortunately it’s very rare.
PGN: How did you get involved with the show “The Mentalist?” BL: Well, they first came to me and a number of my colleagues at our convention with the premise (even before Simon Baker was attached to the show) and it was quite different. The protagonist was a mentalist who billed himself as a psychic and took people’s money. He was going to be played as a fraud so some of our members were against it, but a handful of us decided to participate because I felt it would give us a chance to influence from the inside and make the character someone who would better reflect us and what we do. It was a chance to protect ourselves. It’s actually been very helpful. Before the show, I would tell someone I was a mentalist and they’d say, “What? You work with metal?” Or they’d say, “You’re a medalist? You don’t look like an Olympic athlete!” Plus, we got a free thank-you trip to California to meet Simon and the cast. It’s been fun. Mark and I watch it faithfully and it’s a kick when we see one of our ideas on screen.
PGN: What’s an episode that has one of your ideas? BL: The latest is one that hasn’t aired yet. It’s going to have a body that they show to Patrick and he tells them that the woman had a rare disease six months prior. She looks healthy so they can’t figure out how he knows that but he’s noticed that her fingernails are half-black. When you have liver problems and a lot of fatal diseases, that’s one of the symptoms and it may take a year to grow back — hence she was sick six months before. Those are the types of things we’re trained to observe.
PGN: So you must also study a lot of different fields — health, medicine, psychology? BL: You do. A lot of mental issues and problems come from physical problems; the mind and body are very attached so we have to learn about both. I studied psychology but I’m glad I took the path I did. It’s a great profession to get to travel and meet people. We’ve literally been around the world. I think I’m the only American mentalist to perform at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia.
PGN: Ever screw up? BL: Oh yes, once in a while, but it’s rare. We have one part of the show where I have to choose from several envelopes and put them in a shredder. One of them has a $100 bill from someone in the audience in it and they are the only one who knows which envelope it’s in. I have to read their thoughts to figure out which one. On two occasions, I’ve had to replace the bill. Like I said, it’s not an exact science. But two times in all these years is not a bad record! And hey, after that, people realize that it’s not a trick. Because it’s really not. As I said, sometimes we have to manipulate things just to move the show along, but there’s no magic or tricks involved. There’s one piece that we do with whistles and people thought I was using a special whistle or holding it a certain way to make it blow. So now I give the whistle out at the end to the audience and let them hold it and examine it and keep it. Because I don’t want people to leave the theater thinking, Did he really do that or was there something rigged? Because we don’t, it’s all about the mind.
PGN: I understand Mark is from this area. BL: Oh yes, he’s from Lehigh Valley. I’m looking forward to coming back to Philly. It’s like coming home because we used to go into town quite a lot when he lived there. Great city, great people. In fact, we use a Hershey bar in one of my new bits because Mark is from Pennsylvania. We go to watch the Phillies during their spring training here and Mark roots for them but don’t ask me to choose between them and the Rays.
PGN: Do you read his mind? BL: I can read Mark’s mind like I’m reading a book. We’ll practice it when we travel, like when we’re driving around I’ll read his mind. It’s usually about food! I’ll pick up Pizza Hut or Taco Bell or wherever he’s thinking about stopping.
PGN: You been together for 34-plus years. What’s the key to a long relationship? BL: We make sure we argue at least once a week because makeup sex is the best. And we go out to dinner once a week.
PGN: And what do you do outside of your mentalist work? BL: I paint. In fact, Mark and I had a small art gallery in Alexandria Bay, N.Y. It’s right on the St. Lawrence River and it was great. We had a lot of local artists. For years we would do the cruise-ship circuit during the winter and the art gallery in the summer. We never mixed the two lives. Until one day I was on a Royal Caribbean cruise and a woman came up and said, “I know you! You own the art gallery.” I said, “Yes, but we really like to keep that separated from what we do here.” She said she understood and promised to keep it to herself, but the next issue of the 1,000 Island Sun had us on the front page with the headline, “Gallery owners have hidden life as entertainers.” She outed us to the entire bay! That summer ,as soon as we returned, we got a call from the garden club to do a fundraiser for them and it sold out, so we had to add a second show, then another group wanted to do one. People coming into the gallery wanted me to read their minds and everyone treated us differently so we ended up closing the shop. It was a shame, but I’m one of these people who believe that everything happens for a reason. Before we’re born, before we’re even out of our mother’s womb, it’s all written for us. You are supposed to be doing this interview right now, it’s all written. We all have free choice but we’re supposed to be at certain places at certain times. Mark and I were both in the Navy at the same time and at the same base, one barrack away from each other, yet we didn’t meet until four years later. And we didn’t meet in a bar, I didn’t even know if he was gay, even though we were in P-town so the odds were in my favor. But I knew at first sight that we were meant to be together.
Catch Bob Lawson on stage at the Pride festival, noon-6 p.m. June 9 at Penn’s Landing.
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