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Keith Raymond was born in the small midwestern town of Bent
Fork, Kansas, in 1976. He became an orphan when he was twelve
years old, when during a car trip, he asked to stop at a gas
station to use the rest room, and his parents drove off, never
to return.
Within a year,
he turned to crime, and gained quite a reputation for attempted
bank robberies across the western United States in the early
1990s. Like many teenagers, he was uncoordinated, and the
biggest crime wave he was ever able to pull off was a
hit-and-run car accident involving a 1978 Pinto.
On the run from
the cops, he decided to broaden his horizons and eventually
wound up trying to start a gang in South Dakota. Unfortunately,
nobody answered his ad in the paper, so he packed up his tommy-gun
and went solo. During a brave but failed attempt at robbing the
payroll from a Deadwood dance hall, he met the woman who would
become his wife, Dee "Fast Draw" DeYong. Tired of looking over
her shoulder all the time, Dee finally convinced Keith to give
up the life of crime and try to find a real career. They were
married in 2003.
To make ends
meet, Keith had gone from one dead-end job to the next,
including a stint as an ambulance driver (he was fired for
installing a CD player in the ambulance and turning up the
volume so loud that he deafened several patients). He nearly
landed in jail for heckling a rock band's drummer in a Rapid
City nightclub.
Finally, the
Raymonds hit rock-bottom. Keith was desperate, to the point of
considering becoming a used-car salesman, when one day he viewed
a David Copperfield video Dee had stolen from a Wal-Mart. That
was when the "magic bug" bit him. At first his career was a
rocky one, as he nearly burned down a Montana movie theatre in a
flash-paper accident and lost most of his hair in several
fireworks-related mishaps. But when Dee began appearing onstage
as his assistant, audiences began to take notice and the team's
reputation was finally legitimate.
Keith quickly
learned the mysterious arts of the magician, beginning with the
easiest talent: making a huge debt appear out of nowhere. His
rubber-chicken budget alone was thousands of dollars. In order
to regain his financial footing, Keith began to perform his
magical illusions for audiences worldwide. Unfortunately, his
world currently consists of the area surrounding Rapid City,
South Dakota -- but it will be expanding fast, once his
creditors see this website. |
