Essay in Philippines: Learning Secrets Didn?t Steal MagicInside MagicMagic News Updated Daily for the Professional Magician

“Oh My Goodness!” says Lindsay

There is a pithy and poignant essay in one of the Philippines? fine papers this morning (yesterday for the folks in Manila) about the effect of exposure shows on the psyche.

The essayist proclaims his love for magic not as a performer but as an audience member. He watched women cut in half or levitating and wondered. ?What strange, alien world did these awesome magi of the impossible come from? What inexplicable powers they possessed! Like many other children in the audience, I wished I could be as preternaturally potent as they were.?

He tried to learn the craft but found he couldn?t even fool his puppy.

As he aged, he was treated to the performances of better magicians and even ?more dazzled.? He was stunned when he volunteered for a magician:

One time, I volunteered to be the object of a name magician’s expert moves, and I was stunned when he correctly announced the numbers that made up my TIN code, in exactly the right sequence! Did he have an eye inside my pocket, or what?

In the gentleman?s heart, he knew it was all just a trick but he loved the magic. This last Monday, the masked magician finally made it to the island nation loved by General McArthur.

We don?t know if the show featured the Masked Magician in person but his spirit of disclosure was evident even in the title, “Magicians’ Biggest Tricks Finally Revealed.”

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“Oh My Goodness!” says Lindsay

There is a pithy and poignant essay in one of the Philippines? fine papers this morning (yesterday for the folks in Manila) about the effect of exposure shows on the psyche.

He tried to learn the craft but found he couldn?t even fool his puppy.

As he aged, he was treated to the performances of better magicians and even ?more dazzled.? He was stunned when he volunteered for a magician:

In the gentleman?s heart, he knew it was all just a trick but he loved the magic. This last Monday, the masked magician finally made it to the island nation loved by General McArthur.

We don?t know if the show featured the Masked Magician in person but his spirit of disclosure was evident even in the title, “Magicians’ Biggest Tricks Finally Revealed.”

The show offered time to ?professional magicians? who ?exposed the complex ways they have been able to pull the wool over our eyes for centuries.?

Some of the exposures were benign; such as taking a rabbit from a previously empty hat. Some were not so benign: such as the levitation and the Abbott?s Sword Basket.

There is a happy ending to the story, however. Actually, it was not a very happy ending but a happy ending considering the circumstances. The essayist writes:

All in all, I’ve seen dozens of magic acts exposed as elaborate tricks on the show. For some reason, however, knowing all about the trickery hasn’t drastically diminished my fascination with magic.

Only, this time, I?m fascinated, not with the magical results, but with the complicated moves that the magician and his well-trained assistants have to go through to dazzle their audience into a spectacularly awe-struck suspension of disbelief!

We are thankful to folks like Walter ?Zaney? Blaney for his work to stop the spread of this cancer. It is a shame we have to look for happy endings to otherwise avoidable stories of traitors to our cause.

We don?t know the magicians who adorned the cloak of the prostitute for a quick $372.69 (U.S. equivalent of fee paid), but we know their type. They are not magicians in the sense this essayist or any other magician would use the term. As Harry Houdini told me in my first magic kit, ?A true magician never reveals his secrets.?