THE LEGEND OF KEITH RAYMOND

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 had gained quite a reputation for attempted bank robberies across the western United States by 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 because he accidentally put it it in the "For Rent" section, so he packed up his tommy-gun (which he had affectionately named "Tommy") and went solo. During a brave but failed attempt at robbing the payroll from a Deadwood dance hall during the Sturgis rally, 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 been going 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 shoplifted from a K-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 trick of all: 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.