Stop the abuse: magic and comedy ease tough discussion
By Steve Herring
Published in News on October 2, 2017 5:50 AM
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News-Argus/STEVE HERRING
Freddie Pierce spent 20 years performing and lecturing in schools, businesses, even 80,000-seat venues about all kinds of issues, using magic and humor to introduce delicate subjects. Now he is using those same tactics to talk to children, teens and adults about addiction, abuse and bullying.
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News-Argus/STEVE HERRING
Freddie Pierce uses magic and humor to introduce delicate subjects in to talking to children, teens and adults about addiction, abuse and bullying.
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Freddie Pierce uses magic and humor to introduce delicate subjects in to talking to children, teens and adults about addiction, abuse and bullying.
A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.
But for Freddie Pierce, humor, magic and audience participation help grab the attention of youths and adults alike. The act makes it easier for him to broach tough topics such as drug abuse and cyberbullying.
And it helps those messages stick as well, he said.
"The message is there," he said. "In fact, I don't want people to get the wrong idea that I am going in for a clownly 45- or 60-minute program."
He has plenty of material and props, but one issue that has to be overcome is that schools may want a program, but often lack the funds to pay for it.
To help raise funds to underwrite the program, he plans to ask local restaurants to hire him to perform magic for adults and children as he goes from table to table.
He also hopes that school grants as well as corporate and personal funding will come forward to help.
"We are all in this together," he said.
Pierce's Champions Through Choices program will not have a traditional opening with a speaker walking onto the stage.
Instead, fog will drift across the stage as music fills the air.
Pierce, 52, of Goldsboro, will come running out and have everyone holler "woooooo" with him.
"These kids are not used to seeing these kinds of things, whether they are high-schoolers or kindergartners," he said.
"The kids are like, 'What a minute. We have never seen anything like this before.' So that gets me at least the first three minutes to get their attention and keep it. If I don't get it within that time frame, I've lost them. You can imagine with 3,500 kids if you can't keep their attention that becomes the longest 45 minutes of your life."
Pierce tailors his program to different age groups -- elementary, middle, and high school age students.
The program will revolve around two words -- PEACE and HATE, which are acronyms for positive self-esteem, enthusiastic, authentic, communication and extraordinary and for harmful, anger, trouble, empty.
Pierce will talk about gateway substances that easily hook young people and adults alike -- alcohol, marijuana, prescription drugs and heroin.
He will speak about the major role that peer pressure plays in alcohol and drug abuse, as well as ways to control attitudes and anger toward others by controlling what people say to each other in person and on social media.
"So what I am doing with this program is trying to hit on several topics, but each topic deals with the other," Pierce said. "This program I am working on now has been well over a year in the making, from the time I started brainstorming what I was going to do. I had the technique down. You start with the fog and the music."
Pierce is no stranger to entertaining and spreading a positive message as he tackles issues others avoid.
"I started out 30 years ago this year doing a program on AIDS education," he said. "The Onslow County Schools found out my degree was in psychology, and I was just getting out of college and someone had seen one of my programs."
Pierce did school programs across the country for 20 years and figures he was able to speak to about half a million youths during that time.
He stopped for about 10 years to concentrate on associations, corporations and church programs. He has spoken to audiences from small rooms to almost 80,000. He also does team-building programs for companies.
But over the past few months as he saw how drug and alcohol abuse was starting to rise and, as cyberbullying grew, he decided it was time for him to develop a new school program.
"The main thing I am trying to get across is character education," he said. "The whole thing that works for me is a lot of educational information, a lot of humor and a lot of audience participation."
Pierce can be contacted at 919-344-8499 or by email at piercefreddie@ gmail.com.