MAGICAL NIGHT
Stowe native Dustin Tavella wins it all on ‘America’s Got Talent’
WEST POTTSGROVE » One million dollars richer, and the winner of “America’s Got Talent’s” 16th season, Stowe native Dustin Tavella’s journey to the pinnacle of television all started with a few balloons and a minister.
Tavella, who has steadily made his way forward through the contest show’s eliminations with one amazing magic trick after another, won the heart’s of the judges and the show’s national voting audience Tuesday night and will join “America’s Got Talent Las Vegas LIVE” stage show in November at Luxor Hotel and Casino.
Flustered, overwhelmed, and “still trying to process” his triumph, Tavella spoke with his hometown newspaper Thursday and said he would never have achieved what he has without the help of family and friends back home.
Speaking of home, Tavella, a 2004 graduate of Pottsgrove High School, noted wryly that he doesn’t have one.
“Our lease in Virginia Beach ended yesterday, so technically we’re homeless. I guess we live in Lowe’s Hotel in Hollywood now, but we’ve got to go back to Virginia and get our stuff and I guess we’ll keep it at my parent’s house.”
He conceded that having $1 million on hand may make getting a new home “with lots of creative space for us and our boys” a little easier than it was 48 hours earlier. Tavella chuckled and said: “Yeah, I won a million dollars and moved into my parents’ basement.”
Those parents, Pete and Patti Tavella, were foundational to their son’s success, he said Thursday, by being supportive, and role models. In fact, Dustin is not the first Tavella to appear in a national talent competition.
“My father appeared on ‘Puttin on the Hits,’” a lipsync program that had four seasons during the 1980s. “My mom created his costume,” Tavella said, noting his father pretended to sing the Warren Zevon classic “Werewolves of London.” No word on whether dad won.
“I really want to say thank you to everyone. When I was up there, I didn’t feel like I was on the stage on by myself. I knew I had all my hometown people, friends and family, and all the people who voted for me up there with me.”
— Dustin Tavella
So perhaps performing runs in the family.
Tavella said he felt the urge since he was 7 and watched balloon animals being made. His parents “got him a videotape” and he began to practice.
When he was 9, the family was at a church service in Reading and the minister was asking for volunteers to perform for homeless children and Tavella’s hand shot up. “I think he was expecting adults, but he took me seriously and asked if I would be willing to wear a clown outfit.”
So from the very beginning, a lifetime interest in performing was twinned with the warm feeling Tavella gets in his chest whenever he helps someone.
Perhaps it’s no surprise then that all of his television performances this year have included messages of helping, including a trick which ended with everyone in the audience holding up a piece of paper carrying a simple message — “Be Kind.”
Another trick had a message about donating clothes to someone who needs them, which was matched to an identical message that, since the start of the performance, had been hiding inside — what else? — a balloon.
Tavella told the nation on television that he wanted his performance to help people recognize “the power of giving and that a small act of kindness can go a long way.”
When he was young “my family went through some dark times and someone stepped in to help us out,” he told the television audience. And since then he’s always felt a strong need to do for others.
Once out of high school, he moved to Texas to be part of a Christian mission.
“I went on a mission trip in high school and I fell in love with the idea. I thought, ‘that’s what I want to do with my life, travel around and help people.’”
The mission ran summer camps, took mission trips to Mexico and Germany and helped with relief efforts. “We weren’t getting paid and we were always trying to raise money,” he recalled. He calls that “the day I decided not to live my life normally.”
When he met his wife Kari “and she found out I was a magician, she was like ‘Oh my God, you’ve got to use this to help people,’” he said.
Tavella credits her with kicking his interest in using magic to help others to the next level. “People ask me if she is supportive of what I do and I’m like ‘she’s the reason I do what I do. Sometimes I feel like I’m supporting her, supporting me.”
They needed that support when Kari had a miscarriage at four months.
But another door opened as that one closed. The couple was in Texas and they were helping out at a home for women in crisis. And that’s how they became parents.
One of the women there asked the couple to adopt her son Xander, which they did. Xander had an older brother “who was in the system. And one day, his grandmother called and asked if they could adopt his brother Sylas too,” Pete Tavella told The Mercury last month.
“And that actually happened between the first and second episodes of ‘America’s Got Talent,’ so the film crew was actually there when the brothers met for the first time,” said Pete Tavella.
So in addition to watching their son win a national talent contest, Pete and Patti Tavella have been in California spending lots of quality time with both grandchildren — which has got to be good for some extra storage time in his parents’ basement.
“And I think being with my parents has been really good for Sylas, for him to see that he has a larger family he can depend on,” Dustin said.
So perhaps it was appropriate that the final episode of the season featured a performance with Tavella and Mat Franco, the first magician to win it all on America’s Got Talent; as well as help from television star Rico Rodriguez, who plays Manny, the son of judge Sophia Vergara’s character Gloria on the long-running sitcom “Modern Family.”
“I was excited to follow his lead,” Tavella said of performing with Franco. The idea for their trick, involving more teddy bears than you’ve ever seen on stage at one time, was the result of a brainstorming session between the two and several producers.
For those tricks that he performs solo, Tavella said he usually comes up with them by “trying not to think like a magician, so the tricks don’t come across as something a magician would come up with,” he said.
“Sometimes I start with the trick and then think about what story goes with it. But this last one, I knew what story I wanted to tell, so I had to come up with what effects go with it,” Tavella said.
But in these last weeks of the show, “things have been moving so quickly, I had some help,” he said.
Tavella has often found help along the way, including from the larger family of the Pottsgrove community.
“I remember hanging out at the Vine Street Deli, which my aunt and uncle owned,” he said. “I spent a lot of time there, although it’s not there anymore, and I remember walking to West Pottsgrove Elementary School every day.”
He played T-ball, and some football and wresting in high school, “where I broke my collar bone.” He and some friends started a band called “Evenfield,” for which he was the drummer.
Told that Pottsgrove High School Principal William Ziegler was one of the first people to spread the news that he had won on Twitter, Tavella exclaimed “Dr. Z! I really have had so many incredible people in my life and he was one of them. He was always supportive from day one” when Tavella knew him as the vice principal of Pottsgrove Middle School.
“All this stuff doesn’t happen without a ton of people who support you,” said Tavella.
And since he won, “I’ve had hundreds of text messages from people back home and it’s been really crazy, giving interviews, taking photos and working out details, I don’t know how I am going to get back to them all.”
So he took his hometown newspaper up on its offer to send a message back home: “I really want to say thank you to everyone. When I was up there, I didn’t feel like I was on the stage by myself. I knew I had all my hometown people, friends and family, and all the people who voted for me up there with me,” Tavella said.
In addition to winning $1 million, Tavella will be part of a live “America’s Got Talen Show” in Las Vegas, although details of how and where he will fit in are still being worked out.
What is known is that “America’s Got Talent Las Vegas LIVE” opens Nov. 4 and will run Wednesday to Sunday at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. inside the Luxor Theater.
This summer “America’s Got Talent” has reached more than 60 million viewers across linear and digital platforms. The series is the most-watched summer program for the eighth consecutive year and is the mostwatched summer broadcast unscripted program for the 16th consecutive year, according to a press release issued Thursday morning.
The “Got Talent” format has had more than a billion global viewers since it began airing in 2006 in America and has aired in 194 territories worldwide. “Got Talent” holds the Guinness World Records title as the Most Successful Reality Television Format, with more than 70 local versions produced across Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas.
Auditions for the next season of “America’s Got Talent,” as well as the new “AGT: Extreme,” are currently underway. Interested acts can visit www. AGTAuditions.com to register for an upcoming audition city or to submit a video online.
Who knows, maybe the next winner could be from the greater Pottstown area as well.