Reflections of a Crazed MagicianInside MagicMagic News Updated Daily for the Professional Magician

I Reflect

Sometimes, late at night, when I am all alone, I become reflective. I do not mean I become shiny; although I do sweat sometimes but not so much as to make me shine. It is more of a cold sweat that soaks my poncho and knee-high socks that I like to wear when I reflect. I digress. Tonight, as I reflect on all that magic is and has been one word comes to mind: The Professor’s Nightmare. This rope trick is, to quote an anonymous source, “cunning, baffling and powerful.” It is inscrutable. I have tried to scruit it but I cannot.

Remember the first time? If you are like me, you were probably standing on the customer-side of a glass case filled with tricks, covered with a light patina of dust. (Light Patina was, ironically, Lulu Hurst’s real name. She changed it to become the Georgia Magnet ? the woman who could not be lifted. Her sister, Thin Patina could be picked up by anyone with a good story and a beer.) You watched as the three unequal ropes became the same length and then returned to their original unequal lengths. I know there was a story to it but the imagery alone was sufficient to sell the trick. How upset were you when you learned the ropes were un-gimmicked and nothing was added or removed from the props? I was never one to read instructions, I would look at the trick, view the gimmick and figure it out. I regretted for years that I tossed aside the instructions to The Professor’s Nightmare. In fact, I still don’t know how it is done and I am too proud to ask. I assume it has something to do with the sweat of one’s hands causing the rope to elongate and then immediately shrink but despite my sweating and tugging, I have been unable to do anything but soil the ropes and offend my fellow bus passengers with my grunts of discouragement.

The Gene Anderson Newspaper Tear was another one of those effects that just looked too magical to be true. I tried to make my own for years but failed miserably. I assumed that as in the case of The Professor’s Nightmare, there were no gimmicks added or removed. I tore newspapers just as Doug Henning performed it but no matter how hard I flicked them, they never returned to a restored state.

And that is the point of this little meandering through the reflective recesses of my skull: just because it looks like magic, doesn’t mean that…

I Reflect

And that is the point of this little meandering through the reflective recesses of my skull: just because it looks like magic, doesn’t mean that it is actually accomplished by magic. Often, we magicians will hide the true method to accomplish the effect. I was not used to this concept growing up. I hung out with a close group of magicians who tipped the gaff every time they did a trick. We didn’t believe in instructions or practice. Consequently, the patter was always along the lines of: “Okay, so you have these three cards but only one has a picture of a guy with a cigar and $14 on it. I guess I will show you the other cards and then you pick one and then something will happen with the card that makes it the guy with the cigar card.” That was not the original Emerson and West Color Monte patter but who knew?

As I said, I have a point to this reflective moment and it is this: true magic is the magic we see but can’t figure out and are too cheap to buy and all of our friends are too cheap to buy. Forget the notion that true magic is some ethereal cloud of puffy good wishes descending on you like a jockey’s dandruff on a racehorse’s neck. Real magic, true magic is as close as a great magician or a great demonstrator at a great magic shop. Not the kind of demonstrator that hands you the props and the instructions so you can evaluate the trick before you buy. Those kind of demonstrators are the anathema of magic. In our club, we had a saying, “half measures availed us nothing.” If you want to see real magic, you have to see someone who can do it.

So, I guess I am saying, that in reflecting on the stories in today’s Inside Magic and Inside Magic’s Daily News, there are those who can, and those who can’t. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, don’t. And those who can-can, do-do. That doesn’t sound right, I’ll have to check my refrigerator magnet again. PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, have not said a thing about our top story here on the Inside Magic Daily News. It makes you wonder how much more we can abuse monkeys before they cease to be willing partners in our experiments and return to their monkey-like do-do flinging ways of yesterday. Japan Television has a show called, I believe, Napoleon and the Monkeys airing this year. The plot is simple. Magicians do magic tricks for monkeys and try to fool them.

In the wild, monkeys don’t pick a cards magicians force on them, or guess which hand holds some morsel. The monkeys are free and proud to groom their mates, not wear clothes, and truly select a card, any card from a full deck ? without a force. My point, I guess, is this. Pi?atas are that way for a reason. If you put a real animal on a clothesline and had blindfolded kids whack at it with baseball bats, the neighbors would complain, the kids would suffer nightmares, PETA would protest, the party would be inhabitable for your average birthday magician. My former lover and now U.S. Supreme Court Justice once said as she drained a bowl of Lucky Charms and Vodka, “If God had intended us to whack live animals like pi?atas, He would have made their insides out of candy.”

Which brings us inevitably to the issue of theft of magic secrets and the real point of this rambling mess of a mental meandering session: the best way to keep a magic method secret is to either not do the trick ever or do it so well that no one can guess its secret. A third option, I guess, would be to perform it for monkeys. When you consider the rapid decline in the monkey population over the last 72 years, it is clear there must be something magicians are doing to drive the monkeys to suicide or to hide from the naturalists who perform the monkey census. When Vaudeville died 72 years ago, monkeys were left out of the entertainment picture. Their roller-skating and juggling skills did not help them when they returned to the unemployment line or non-show biz jobs. And that’s the point of this essay: monkeys must have a creative outlet or magicians will perish.

My first wife/cousin once told me, “it’s not what you’ve done, it’s what the Warden thinks you’ve done.” True dat. What others perceive is more important than what we are. If it looks to our audience as if we are doing real magic ? stretching and un-stretching rope, or tearing and restoring a newspaper ? then we are better people than if we are simply standing in front of a monkey cage hoping the primate will fall for a Classic Force. It was the great anthropologist Margaret Meade who wrote, “monkeys, like man, will scratch when they itch, laugh when they feel glee, cry when they are sad, and sheepishly smile when they have gas.” Rupert MacDonald, a later commentator on Dr. Meade’s work, pointed out, “man never has gas as bad as a sheep.” And that is my point: try as you might, you will never out do a sheep in the essential talents that separate the men from the sheep.

The sun is now rising and I realize I have written this ensemble of thought but not really addressed the issue that burns like the strong rays of the morning dawn into my unprotected retina. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, wouldn’t it be unflattering and insincere to perform magic in a way that is totally original and does not steal from the great magicians of our day? Of course. So when I perform my complete knock-off of the Copperfield show, using my handmade versions of his illusions, aren’t I really saying, “I respect Mr. Copperfield and the innovators behind his show so much that I am willing to steal their stuff”? I think so. A journalist once asked the great Houdini what he would be doing if he wasn’t a great escape artist; say, perhaps, he was a house painter. Houdini said without hesitation, “I’d be a paint-covered dead guy in a padlocked milk can.”

And that really is the point of this essay: you have to do what you have to do. If performing for primates is your calling, you need to do it. If innovating new pi?ata designs is your thing, hoist the family cat in a tree and get the blindfolds. If you are a sheep, ask your shepherd to pull your finger. If you want to be a magician, learn the ropes from those who know them. If you want to flatter the great magicians of our day by stealing their material and building your own versions of the props rather than provide an income for the innovators, you would be better off swinging a baseball bat at a gaseous sheep above your head while a monkey performs split-fans to the music provided by the very anxious sheep.

I am glad to share; because like a smiling sheep, sharing is what I do.