Steve Trash In The News
New York Times
Fort Worth Star Tribune
Charlotte Observer
Star-Ledger (NJ)
Minnesota Daily
Northwest Florida Daily News
Florence Times Daily
Quad Cities Times
The New York Times
Sunday, April 22, 2001
Arts and Entertainment
The Magical Side of Trash
by Neil Genzlinger
There’s bad news for those who have been trampled by the stock market: Steve Trash may not be making hundred-dollar bills out of old newspapers when he brings his offbeat magic show to the Community Theater in Morristown next weekend.
“It’s too small,” he said of the illusion which is in his repertory but may not be right for the a house the size of the Community Theater.
There will however, be plenty of other tricks to help him make the same point: that natural resources, and even trash, are valuable.
He calls his show “The Trashman Cometh” and bills it as “magic with a message,” one of environmental responsibility., Mr. Trash lives in Alabama, bu the idea for the show occurred to him when he was a New York street performer. New Yorkers, in that somewhat pushy way they have, were always handing him pieces of litter and saying, “Let’s see you do magic with that.”
Now he has a whole show built around trash and other found objects. A high point is a Houdini-like escape from a Dumpster. “I wanted to create entertainment,” he said, “but I also wanted to have a subtest of introducing people to the idea that they’re connected to the rest of the universe whether they like it or not.” Shows are next Sunday at 1 and 4pm.
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Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Oct. 3, 1991
State fair magician performs for the sake of environment
by Monica Stavish
Dallas - Steve Trash is the first to admit that his magic act at the State Fair of Texas is full of garbage.
Looking a lot like a chimney sweep after a hard day, Trash attracted a crowd of curious onlookers at the fair yesterday with his environmental magic show - slick magic tricks, wisecracks and reminders about the fragile Earth.
As he knelt on the ground and pulled rags and other recycled props from a battered briefcase, Trash interspersed clever tricks with comments about saving the environment. Slowly pulling a long feather through a coin, he reminded a rapt audience that everything on Earth is somehow related to everything else.
Trash, whose act is sponsored by a beer company, is one of the draws of the 105th annual State Fair, which runs through Oct. 20. Dressed in tattered jeans, worn-out sneakers and a broken hat, he and his traveling briefcase will appear at the fair through Oct. 13.
A native Texan who worked as a street magician in New York City, Trash operates out of a Wilshire Boulevard suite in Los Angels while he tries to make it big in show biz. he declines to divulge his true surname because he hopes to turn “Steve Trash” into a national figure - an icon for “Reduce, reuse and recycle.”
Trash, 29, said he realized the importance of recycling before its latest surg in popularity. he said he turned his magic act into an envieronmentally oriented one back in 1986 on the streets of New York.
“I don’t really like the title environmentalist,” Trash said. “We’re all in this, on this planet connected to the same air, water and earth. That should tell you we aall need to care.”
Though his message is serious Trash manages to make his audience chuckle. After mysteriously conjuring up a missing coinf rom beneath a red rag, he prompts spectators to acknowldege his accomplishment.
“I think you guys missed it. That was an applause cue,” he said with a grin.
Pointing to his raggedy black jacket and other props, Trash described his stage persona as street smart, yet innocent.
“It’s a nice contradiction of character,” he said. “if you’re too streetsmart, and audience won’t like you. And an audience has to either like you or not like you at all. I don’t get abusive. If I take a stab at somebody, I take it back.”
Trash, who take shi show to schools, festivals and other fairs, has worked with magic tricks since he was 7 and knows what makes a good audience - interest.
“People mesh together, like a group mentality. It
s a concept I discovered as a street performer,” he said. “No performer will be brilliant unless the audience is brilliant. They give you energy back.”
With a grin, he addeed that the hardest magic trick isn’t a trick at all - it’s making sure audiences enjoy themselves but learn the importance of “Reduce, reuse and recycle.”
“That’s why I named myself Trash,” said the magician, who even carries a gold American Express card engraved with the name Steve Trash.”
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The Charlotte Observer
March 10, 2000
To eco-illusionist Steve Trash, human nature isn't an oxymoron
By Lawrence Toppman
Despite all the arrogant athletes and toilet-mouthed comedians in the world, there is one person who needs to talk trash to your kids.
To him, junk is literally magical, something to be turned into props for an afternoon of entertainment. He's the Godfather of Garbage. But instead of making an offer you can't refuse, he makes refuse you can offer to an audience.
His real name has been lost to the mists of time, except for a select few friends in the backwoods of Alabama. He's the title star of the Steve Trash Illusion Show.
He has even recycled himself. After getting a B.A. in theater from the University of North Alabama in 1984, he moved to New York to become a street performer. He worked as a traditional magician in Central Park, until he became intrigued with the vast amount of garbage lying around. He began to incorporate it into his act. Eventually,it was his act.
"Garbage is pretty fascinating to me," he says. "It's anything you've decided isn't valuable any more, even though it was worthwhile to you 20 minutes ago.
"An example is a plastic bottle of soda. You can't drink soda unless you have something to keep it in, so you need a bottle. When you finish drinking, you throw the bottle away, because it's useless. But if you wanted to store something in it, it would be valuable again."
You may be wondering whether Trash's show is a thinly veiled opportunity to preach, like the high school assemblies where musicians gig for a while, then give a long anti-drug lecture. Fear not.
"My show is quality family entertainment with an ecological subtext," says Trash. "You can enjoy it completely for the fun in it: 'He just sawed a lady in half with a chain saw! He just made that diaper come to life and dance around the stage!' But I also want the audience to understand the connections I make to the natural world."
When Trash first did magic with a message, he emulated the Flying Karamazov Brothers, who promised to juggle any props audience members could bring to ashow.
"Mistake!" he says. "You can imagine people's choices. There were some things I wouldn't have touched with a rubber glove. But 60 percent of my props are still stuff I've found in the garbage.
"Our set looks kind of like a cross between David Copperfield and 'Stomp.' We use real tires, and the crate I use to saw Mother Nature in half is a real box, not something built for me. I create an "Eco-Hero" - someone who respects himself, otherpeople and his environment - in a Frankenstein-type box by pouring in old clocks, a fan belt, some casters, and a few things with cool dials on them that even I can'tidentify.
"Friends and roadies gather this stuff and bring it to me. A rigger at the Texas State Fair came up to me with a Stretch Armstrong doll that had been run over many times in the road. Now Stretch illustrates recyclability by driving a toy dump truck around for me."
Trash comes by a social conscience naturally. His father was a forester and his mother a teacher, so little Steve was aware of links between humanity and nature.
Today, he lives a bermed house, one with earth on three sides of a south-facing wall that consists almost entirely of glass, on 80 acres near Bankhead NationalForest in Alabama. The other walls are concrete blocks that draw cool temperatures from the ground in summer and warm temperatures in winter. He and his wife compost and conserve even in small ways.
"I'd like Steve Trash to be a Roy Rogers for the 21st century. Roy was entertaining, he walked the walk, and he said, 'This is how I've chosen to live my life. If you choose to do that, I think the world may be a better place.'
"My hope is that people will learn by example. We'll decide we don't want to live in the 'Blade Runner' society, so we'll make the right choices along the way."
ŠThe Charlotte Observer
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The Star-Ledger
Edison, NJ
April 27-May 3 2001
Magician tries to make litter lovers vanish - good clean fun -
by Allison Freeman
Steve Trash says he finds refuse “innately interesting.” That’s good, because he is surrounded by it.
It is everywhere in his show “The Trashman Cometh,” which does arrive at the Community Theater in Morristown on Sunday.
A huge dumpster, and old tennis ball, ice cream cones, aused crutches and even a few pairs of boxer shorts (“which have been laundered”) are strewn across the stage. This is all part of a magic show with a message.
Trash, who declines to give his real name (“all my friends call me Trash”), said his show will include levitation of members of the audience, changing newspaper into $100 bills, escaping from a dumpster and sawing “Mother Nature” in half with a chainsaw. The show is intended to educate children about environmental issues as well as provide entertainment.
Trash, 38, started practicing magic tricks as a child. When he started work in 1984 as a street performer outside the Central Park Zoo in New York, “people would give me stuff they had found on the walkway, and I would do magic tricks with it.”
Trash wants to encourage people to respect, each other as well as their surroundings. “The environment is not just trees and bugs and stuff like that. It’s people, too. You can’t have one without the other. It’s all connected.”
Trash now lives in Alabama and spends 235 days of the year on the road. he spends a lot of time in thrift stores and junkyards. “The thing about garbage is it’s just a natural resource you have decided isn’t baluable anymore. It’s your perception.”
A discarded tennis ball now has eyes and a nose and a name - “Ted the Tennis Ball” - and is an important part of “The Trashman cometh,” which Trash performs wearing a tuxedo and a Mad Hatter-ish top hat. His outfit is covered with pins and bits of trash. “I decorate it with anything I can find, as long as it’s not stinky.”
Trash notes people need to be careful with garbage. He personally wears gloves ehen he goes through it.
“The main idea behind our show is not to encourage garbologists out thee. The idea is to get people to think about their own waste.
“The show usually lasts one hour, but that depends onhow much feedback and craziness and energy the audience adds to it,” Trash said. “I am very much into interaction with the audience.”
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The Minnesota Daily
Comic thinks globally, performs locally
Joe Carlson - Staff Reporter
Ted the talking tennis ball lip-synched the Beatles' "Revolution," his spongy mouth and puppet eyes moving like a cross between Ringo Starr and Pac Man. Ted's purpose was to teach an environmental lesson, and his puppeteer was illusionist and comedian Steve Trash.
Trash, who describes himself as a "world-class eco-tainer" because all of the props he uses, like Ted, are collected from the garbage cans and thrift stores of America.
"Each trick illustrates an ecological principle or an ecological concept," Trash said. Ted the talking tennis ball, for example, was intended to show how a revolution in Americans' treatment of garbage could lend new utility to once-discarded products.
Trash performed Friday afternoon in the Terrace Cafe in the St. Paul Student Center for a crowd of about 40 people.
He said his show equally balances entertainment and education. "If you're going to talk about the environment, do it with a smile," he said.
Trash, who was raised in Alabama, has been performing his show since 1984. He said he was first inspired to raise environmental awareness as a child.
"My dad was a forester, and growing up, all of our vacations were camping trips," Trash said.
He learned a lot about the importance of the environment on these trips, and was surprised when he discovered that most people were not as aware and concerned about these matters as he was. He began performing his show to counter such apathy to ecological issues.
One of the most important themes in his routine, Trash said, is the metaphor of the web of life.
"I teach people about the connectedness of the natural world with my show," Trash said. "People and nature are connected and they cannot be separated."
Trash often uses volunteers from the audience to assist with his illusions. One volunteer, Casey Monear, a senior in the College of Natural Resources, said Trash's show is effective because of its accessibility.
"It is something that kids and adults can get into," Monear said.
Monear watched Trash in amazement Friday as Trash seemingly passed a taut rubber band through another band she was holding for him.
"It was taut and it just went through," she said.
Trash said that although his show has always dealt with the environment, it wasn't always overtly educational.
"Before it was sort of a `figure it out for yourself' thing," Trash said. But the environmental disasters of the `80s, including the Bhopal gas release and the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, led Trash to reexamine his performance. "In 1988 I was at a crossroads ... I decided to either get out of performing or go ahead and make it mean something."
The program was organized and sponsored by the University Community Activities Network, with the Performing Arts Committee and the Environmental Program Committee. ŠThe Minnesota Daily
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Northwest Florida Daily News
November 18, 2000
Magician sends a message: Recycling makes trash disappear
Steve Trash takes his magic show to nine Okaloosa County schools.
By ANGIE TOOLE, Daily News Staff Writer
BLUEWATER - Steve Trash wrapped up a nine-school tour in Okaloosa County, making a little magic with a message at Bluewater Elementary.
Trash called his magic show a mixture of purpose and performance, the purpose being ecology education.
As a Friday afternoon break from class, Karen Peek's third-grade class took the lesson to heart. Aaron Marchese was able to rattle off the motto of the show: "recycle, reduce, reuse." His classmate, Megan Scanlan, was impressed with Trash's ability to promote recycling through magic tricks. "He used all kind of things you would really recycle in his tricks, like bottles and stuff," she said. Dalton Cooper, like many of his classmates, enjoyed the fact that magic was part of the lesson. After all, he's an old hand at illusion, having attended magic school at the summer "Kids on Campus" program at Okaloosa-Walton Community College.
Still, Cooper and his classmates haven't quite yet figured out how all the illusions worked. For Trash, ecology is more than just a theme for his performance, but a passion in life. Trash lives in a berm house in Frog Pond, Ala. - when, that is, he's home. He's on tour more than 200 days a year. He said his beliefs are more than just a political stance, they're part of a good character, "because it's all a matter of respect, respect for the fact that recycling just echoes what nature does." The Okaloosa County Recycling Department sponsored the illusionist through an education grant. His Web site offers lesson plans on ecology, with some magic tricks to draw kids' participation, at www.stevetrash. com
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Times Daily
Florence, Alabama
Trash turns garbage into cash, enduring career in entertainment
By Russ Corey
Staff Writer
It's hard to believe it's been 20 years since a heckler challenged the man who would one day become Steve Trash to do a magic trick with a sticky gum wrapper in New York City's Central Park.
Had he not been quick on his feet and remembered a vanishing coin trick he used many times before, Trash might not have spent the last two decades as the premier environmental entertainer.
Trash said he thought to himself, "If I do this, I can make more money." The gum disappeared, Trash made $20 off the heckler and found the theme that would set him apart from other entertainers and magicians.
"It occurred to me much earlier in my college career that I needed to pick a theme that was different from other entertainers," he said. "It just clicked. Trash was a cool theme. Recycling fit into that, reuse fit into that."
Trash, who went to school in Florence but now resides (when he' not on the road) in Frog Pond, tours the country spreading the word about recycling though the use of magic and his metal garbage can full of props. Contacted Friday in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Trash said he just played two sold-out shows in a 2,000-seat venue. The shows were sponsored by Bluestem Solid Waste Agency.
"I got to tour the largest cardboard recycling facility in North America," Trash said. "Let me tell you, it was awesome."
One thing Trash thinks he's accomplished in his 20-year career is that he's been able to spread the message of recycling to young America. "I regularly get e-mails from kids," Trash said. "I know that kids buy into the cult personality. If they think I'm hip, they will try to emulate me." Kids, he said, are well aware of recycling and how it helps preserve the environment.
He also receives e-mails from parents and those who admit to backsliding in their recycling efforts. One of the complaints of municipal solid waste officials is that there is a soft market for recyclable materials. Trash agrees, to a point.
"The markets are not terrible," he said. "They're not as good as they were in the early '90s."
The solution, he said, is for consumers to purchase items that are made from recyclable materials.
"We have to ratchet up the stuff we buy," Trash said. "If I created a completely new show, it would be about buying recycled products." Trash said the ideal age group to receive his message is 9 years old, but he frequently receives autograph requests from kids ages 4-12.
The point of his presentations are to be entertaining and educational at the same time.
"I want to be great at both of them," Trash said. "So many times, educators are really good, but not very interesting. They don't know how to make it appealing."
"I much prefer the education end of it, teaching young people how to be better environmental consumers," he said. While Trash is happy with where his career is today, he really expected it to be more successful that it is.
Kids know him on a national level, but not on the same level as someone with a television program.
"I really expected it to be that big," he said. "It's the right message, the right attitude. Kids totally dig what I'm doing, the crazy mad hatter hat, the hip-hop pants. The image works for them." Television might not be as far away as it seems.
Trash said he will be travelling to Beverly Hills to meet with representatives of National Geographic Kids TV. Trash hopes the meeting will help him move to the next level in his career.
A move like that would just help him reach a wider audience with his message of recycle and reuse.
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Quad Cities Times
Magician delivers recycling message
By David Heitz
A nationally known magician talked trash Thursday with more than 3,000 Scott County school children during two performances at the Capitol Theatre in Davenport.
The shows, sponsored by the Waste Commission of Scott County, combined messages about recycling with jokes, sleight-of-hand tricks and magic. Dozens of school buses lined Ripley Street outside the theater while children inside shrieked, hollered and applauded comedian and magician Steve Trash (his legal name).
Trash wowed children as he pulled items out of a magic hat, made a tennis ball fly and liberated a woman with butterfly wings from a milk crate. “What are the magic words?” he repeatedly asked the children. “Reduce, reuse, recycle.”
Trash, a fast talker with a quick wit and dressed like a hobo, told the audience that the average American tosses out more than three pounds of garbage per day. “We’re wasting all these natural resources.”
He pulled from the trash a container of glue wearing a Superman cape (“Super Glue,” he called it), a rotten potato dressed like a Star Wars action figure (“Darth Tater,” he joked) and other items which elicited laughs from the children.
Trash honed his skills during several years as a street performer in New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo.
“There was so much trash and garbage everywhere I just naturally went into it,” he said. “I’m teaching kids about the value and importance of recycling through a magic show. Scott County is a cool place because it has curbside recycling.”
Today marks the 35th anniversary of Earth Day, which is organized by Earth Day Network. Students who attend Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School in Bettendorf said they practice Earth Day every day in their homes.
“The show was funny,” said 10-year-old Halle Watson. “We recycle cans at my house. It saves the earth.”
Austin Bries, 10, said he also enjoyed the show, which was chock full of puns, plays on words and humor aimed at little people. “I thought it was pretty cool.”
Austin ticked off a long list of items his family recycles, including cardboard boxes, milk cartons and cans.
Kathy Morris, executive director of the waste commission, said the county is celebrating 10 years of curbside recycling this year. “This is the first of several big events. We want to share with the community how successful the program has been.”
Every week, the county hauls away about seven big rigs filled with recyclables, or 10 tons of stuff that would otherwise end up in the landfills.
“We have found that the most efficient form of environmental education is with the children,” Morris said. “They get excited about it. They go back to their homes and help their parents get it right. They know that they personally make a difference.”
Earth Day Network was founded by the organizers of the first Earth Day in 1970. The group promotes environmental citizenship and year-round progressive action worldwide. Its mission is to build broad-based citizen support for sound, workable and effective environmental and sustainable development policies.
Earth Day Network is a driving force steering environmental awareness around the world with a global network that reaches more than 12,000 organizations in 174 countries. As a result, Earth Day is celebrated by more than a half-billion people every year.
Eight-year-old Bethany King said she enjoyed watching the flying tennis ball but also heard Trash’s message loud and clear. “We shouldn’t litter and things should be reused so we don’t have to make more.”