12.09.2005

Remarkable Magicians #3. Dai Vernon.

There are many magicians but very few masters in magic. Dai Vernon was above all a master. The professor, as he was known around the World was the man who changed the face of modern magic and reinvented close up magic.I first met Dai when I joined the Magic Castle in Hollywood. He was every inch the master when you saw him holding court in a corner of the Castle with a brandy in a snifter, a cigarette in the ashtray and a deck of cards in his hand. Magicians would discretely shadow him for hours just to add a little touch or move from his endless store of wisdom. Dai was very subtle, nothing he did was flashy or “show-offy”, it was just right. For any situation that might present itself during a card trick the professor had at least half a dozen ways to get where he wanted to go. Some of the greatest books of sleight of hand routines can be traced directly to his fertile mind. He was also generous and a true gentleman.
In spite of the fact that I have always made my living performing comedy magic I have a guilty secret, I am also a first rate sleight of hand magician, shh, don’t tell anyone! However to me the mark of a true magician is to appear not to be doing anything other than watching the magic happen. My greatest joy is to find a move that works perfectly and then find a way to make it look like it isn’t happening. Dai was a fan of my magic but deeply suspicious of the laughs my show created in audiences, to him anything that wasn’t magic was unnecessary and indeed a detraction from a magic show. Dai kept asking me why did I feel the need to make people laugh and in honesty it was a good question. Over the years I learned a great deal from the ‘spirit’ of Dai, he was unique and
truly a living legend in a World where everyone thought they were legends. Sometimes late at night when the Castle closed I would take Dai for a late night supermarket run to the all night Hughes market in Hollywood, I would push the cart and he would throw some groceries into it, then I would drive him home and carry the grocery bags to his door. I always enjoyed these late night runs, it was fun to spend time alone with the great man and watch him choose between brands of dishwashing liquids. It made someone who was a legend into a real life person.
Well, I never did give up the comedy in my act and I still haven’t quite worked out why I need to get those laughs. However, after seeing one of my shows in the ‘Parlor of Prestidigitation’ Dai said something that I will never forget.
He looked me in the eye and said that his greatest joy was that he had never needed to perform magic for a living. He then added that if he had to actually earn his living doing magic then he would come to me and buy my linking finger ring routine. He loved the strength of the magic and thought the comedy was perfect for the routine. Then he gave me a big wink and said; “But I wouldn’t ever want to perform magic for a living, it’s more fun perfecting it.”
Here’s to the great perfector, if there is a heaven, I know Dai will be in a corner of it with a brandy in a snifter, a cigarette in an ashtray and a deck of cards in his hand.

12.02.2005

The Three Forces

People often ask what a magician does. These are the people who have realized that the answer must be more than; “He fools people.” Magicians have been around for a long time and their standing was a lot better than it is now. During the last century the average magician has been a cross between a game show host and used car salesman. It wasn’t always this way. When people ask me that question, and I think they want a serious reply, I always say the same thing; a magician’s job is to wake up people who don’t know they are asleep. If that answer makes them want to ask more questions then the real conversation can begin.
Aleister Crowley the notorious British magician had another answer; a magician causes change according to will. Crowley
(Which rhymes with holy) was the self-proclaimed wickedest man in the world. In the ‘60’s his lifestyle would have made him a prototype hippy. However, not many hippies had his strength of mind or body, he was a one of a kind which is probably just as well! He was also one of the three great magicians of his era. The other two were Rasputin known as the mad monk (His name which means the dissolute one, a more accurate description) and the other is Mr. G.I. Gurdjieff. About Grigory Rasputin I have very little to say except that he was a very tough man to kill! However, modern magick reached the crossing in the road with the works of Crowley and Gurdjieff. Most followers of Mr. Gurdjieff’s ideas would be reluctant to believe that magick has much to do with his teachings. Most followers of Crowleyanity wouldn’t be prepared to acknowledge that much else was worth exploring. Since both men were brilliant, misunderstood and ahead of their time a comparison of their ideas can be a very illuminating experience.
Among the conclusions that a careful study would reveal is that both men were expert and adept at controlling forces that very few people realize exist, let alone understand.
Without adding much detail at this point let me define these three forces in Gurjieffian terms.
Force One: Holy Affirming.
Force Two: Holy Denying.
Force Three: Holy Reconciling.
These forces have been given many different names and feature in most spiritual practice. These three forces may be considered active, passive and neutralizing in their nature and are related to the three astrological modes (Cardinal, fixed and mutable) and they function in much the same way. In his final writings Mr. Gurdjieff turned them into a very practical code for living.
I Am
I Can
I Wish
In this form they become the key to All and Everything.
Later on I will explore these ideas in more detail but for now just let the words run loose in your mind. Rearrange the order.
Before you realize them as a key you need to see the door they will open.

11.22.2005

Who's on first?

My very first club date in America was at the Elks club in Long Beach, California. A stroke of good luck that was going to add a whole eighty bucks to my worldly wealth. I was very excited and ready to take the ‘Elks’ by storm. After a one-hour drive to
Long Beach I made myself known at the club and was directed backstage to meet up with the other acts. Now it is amazing how often the entertainment bookers of these kinds of organization make truly rational decisions but this one was a doozy! The committee had determined that four acts would be appropriate for the occasion and the booker had decided that the perfect choice would be two magic acts and two jugglers. He furthermore decided that the ideal running order would be to have the two magic acts in the first half of the show and after a brief break to continue with the two jugglers.
Of course, there is no payment for the job of booking entertainment at a service club and maybe it is bookings like this that are the reason.
Upon arriving in the dressing room I discovered that the other magician on the bill was Mr. Electric and Carol, a very serious
name in magic. I was very impressed. I was also somewhat astounded when Marvyn (for that is indeed Mr. Electrics first name) suggested that he opened the bill and leave me to close the first half. I thought my stock in the magic world must be on the rise. This was the evening that I learned the age old secret of variety acts; always go on first or as close to the beginning as you can.
To cut a painful story short Marvyn and Carol opened the show with a dynamic set that featured customized versions of every trick I did, all carefully adapted to the theme of their show. I followed and proved that lightning seldom strikes twice on one night. I didn’t die on stage, but I was quite sick!
After the show I chatted with Marvyn who was very kind and quite complementary about my show. Especially my version of the classic Chineese linking rings, maybe this was because it was the only trick I hadn’t duplicated. In fact, in what I later discovered was pure Marvyn at his best he planned an entire act for me based on linking things together.
As I remember I was to change my name to Link Lewin. Marvyn was the King of themed magic. What I should do, said Marvyn, was buy the Himber Ring Trick, which would allow me to link rings borrowed from the fingers of audience members. It sounded like a great idea and the next day I drove into Hollywood and paid fifty dollars to Joe Berg as a down payment on this very trick. It was the best investment I was ever to make in magic. Every magician needs one special trick to make his own and thanks to Mr. Electric I had found mine. I never did change my first name to Link, but due to this encounter with the gracious and friendly master magician.
I had taken a huge step forward in my career as a magician.
Oh, and I never again felt flattered at being asked to close a variety bill, like a true pro, I merely say; “You know, It might be better for the show if I open.”

11.15.2005

Billy McComb at the Conway Hall

There is a very special hall in London that changed a lot of things for me it is called the Conway Hall. When I first started to watch magic shows this was a very important spot because
once a month there was a magic show there that featured the best performers in London. Actually some might not have been that good but at age eleven it never occurred to me at the time. There was a small musical combo that accompanied the acts. If I close my eyes I can still conjure up the vision of the drummer who’s name was Alfred. He looked like a merchant banker perched behind his drum kit, in fact he probably was a banker but not on the first Monday of every month. During the show he could have been one of the ‘Sultans of Swing’ as he rapped out drum rolls, riffs and rimshots to punctuating the onstage antics. I saw many fine magicians perform on that stage John Wade, Ali Bongo, Alan Shaxon, George Kovari and many others.
The night that I remember the best at the Conway Hall was the night I first saw Billy McComb. Billy was a legend in magic
and a full time magician who didn’t have to worry about a real job to distract him from the world of magic. Billy had an easygoing Irish charm that won over an audience by the time he had finished walking out onstage. To this eleven year old he was nothing less than dazzling.
The first time I sat in the dark theatre and watched Billy perform I realized that what he did is what I wanted to do. In many ways I have never changed my mind and that most of my life has been devoted to trying to be like him.
What took my breath away when Billy performed was the way he blended non-stop comedy and amazing magic.
other comedy magician fell far short of the mark when you compared them to Billy. Most intriguingly he performed small tricks that seemed to make the biggest impact I had ever seen on an audience. He turned blank pieces of paper into five-pound notes. He put a half crown inside a tiny Schweppes bottle. Best of all, he took a tiny piece of white thread and after breaking it into small pieces he elegantly restored it all the while causing huge waves of laughter with a steady stream of one liner jokes. I remember watching him standing in the spotlight in his sharp mohair suit, gazing intently at the piece of thread as the entire audience burst into wild applause. The fact that he later produced a live hen from nowhere was amazing but not the same class of thrill for me. No I had it straight in my mind I wanted to be Billy McComb. If I could be half as charming, half as witty and able to transfix an entire theatre with a piece of thread, well that would be just fine for me. I didn’t get to meet Billy that night but I soon did and that is a whole other story. Move over Houdini the young magician has a new hero.

11.09.2005

Waiting for the postMAN.

Once you had decided to become a magician you started the lifelong pursuit of finding tricks to perform. When you first begin this is largely accomplished by spending endless hours pouring over magic catalogues and deciding on the tricks you absolutely can’t live without. Then you get a money order, send it away and then you wait for the postman to bring the precious box to your front door. The most exciting part of this procedure is the waiting because it allows you to let your imagination run wild about the ‘miracle’ that is making it’s way to your hot and sticky hands. You keep re-reading the description in the catalogue, visualizing every aspect of the next addition to your show. Magic catalogues have a language all there own, partly truth and partly fiction! Certain phrases are special flags that attract a youthful customer. My special favorites were ‘Packs flat and plays big’, ‘can be performed surrounded’ and ‘Needs no resetting’. At the bottom of the catalogue listing for the trick (just before the price) was a list of ways in which the trick was not accomplished. This list usually included; ‘No threads’, ‘No magnets’ ‘No mirrors’ and very often threw in a ‘No skill required’ as well. It was enough to keep your mind racing for days. Generally speaking when you finally got to rip open your parcel your first reaction was sheer stark disappointment. What was inside the package seemed like a waste of time and money and even if you could make it work it wouldn’t fool the village idiot. However you were stuck with it, because another ubiquitous phrase in magic catalogues is ‘No refunds and no exchanges’.
These magic dealers have to make their living somehow and they have chosen the route of packaging inexpensive items into much more expensive bundles by combining them into a ‘So-called trick’. I am not saying that magic dealers are unscrupulous but I certainly wouldn’t let my daughter marry one. A very early lesson in magic is that secrets cost money. The strange part is that if you spent long enough working on the trick, rehearsing it in front of a mirror and tinkering with it, you sometimes ended up with something that actually worked! Not always, in fact not very often, but every now and then you ended up with what we in the magic world call ‘a keeper’. Even weirder was the way that sometimes a fellow magician could really fool and impress you with what you later discovered was a trick you had long since discarded either physically or mentally. The magic dealer and postman may have brought the trick to your living room but it wasn’t going to go much further till you added a little something of your own.
I would like to tell you that it all changes as you get older and wiser but it doesn’t. I have a garage full of props that seemed like a good idea when I bought them. In fact the only thing that changes is that the older you get the more money you spend/waste on tricks you will never perform. However along the way though, something does change, you start to develop a style and a personality all you own and that is when the magic really begins. How does this subtle change exert it’s self? My belief is that it has a lot to do with your powers of visualization. While it is very rare to actually see the future, with a little practice it becomes quite possible to look carefully at yourself in the present and project that persona into the future. Maybe it is all that standing in front of mirrors
Intently watching your physical body. Seeing not just what you are but what you wish to become. This seems to be a trait shared by many performers, watch any actor who doesn’t think he’s being watched and you will notice they never pass a mirror without a glance. It is visualization not thought projection but maybe a little bit of time travel is involved. Unless I am very much mistaken the core message of my teacher is contained in just six words. I am I can I wish. It is the intensity and order of these three forces that creates your future and turns visualization into reality. We will discuss these three forces in more detail later but right now I want to see if the postman has delivered the mail. I am expecting a package with a new trick in it that ‘packs flat and plays big.’

11.07.2005

Jupiter and beyond.

Sometimes things seem so normal and natural that you don’t realize that they might be something else until they are gone. As a rather young child I had a strange ritual that put me to sleep every night. I would lie in my bed and imagine that I was sitting in an invisible chair suspended in a dark and featureless place somewhere in a space somewhere above or within me. When I felt very comfortable I would then pretend that I was revolving on my axis in a forward direction until it felt very natural and easy. Then came the difficult part. I would imagine that while still revolving in a vertical direction I would begin to feel myself spinning sideways and around a horizontal axis. It was a very strange mental feeling that took a little while to get just right and after it did then things started to happen on their own. I would get a strange ‘whooshing’ sensation and begin to move forward at a very fast speed, at least it was a feeling of rolling forward at a fast speed, except I wasn’t really moving everything was rolling around me and my vision remained straight ahead. It felt a little like being a bowling ball moving in an unstoppable line going faster and faster. When I hit a certain speed everything turned into blurred straight lines and small square lights. That was it, but it happened night after night for several years until one night it didn’t happen. It just stopped. I tried to recreate the experience but it never happened again so I just let it go. Forty years later I sat in a cinema in Henderson, Nevada watching Robert Zemeckis’ film “Contact’. The movie was based on Carl Sagen’s Sci-fi novel and starred Jody Foster and suddenly the movie recreated this experience for me in vivid cinematic terms. Jody Foster sat in a chair and the entire process was reenacted as a physical experience. It was a stunning moment and my memories flooded back to me with such power that I started to cry as I sat there surrounded by my family in the half empty movie theatre. My eyes filled with tears and I wept and wept like a child, excited and amazed that my childhood memories were not mine alone and they had been recreated and shared. I intuitively realized watching the movie that the motion and basis of the experience was intimately connected with the movements within an atom. All my life I have felt strangely driven but without any particular goal or direction other than a curious conviction that if time was going in a forward direction then I was moving in the opposite one. For a moment or two sitting weeping in that theatre everything came together for me and although I couldn’t have articulated it I knew who and what I wasn’t. For about fifteen years I had been reading books about quantum mechanics and puzzling my mind about the sub-atomic level of being. Sitting in that cinema everything came together for me. I realized that the nuclear/sub atomic world wasn’t something you read about or thought about. It wasn’t something to be analyzed it was something to be experienced. It was something that you were.

11.02.2005

The man with the Snake

One of my first real mentors in magic was an elderly man with the slightly sinister name of Roy Cowl. Roy was the kind of person you say; “Wow, he’s a one of a kind!” Then after a time amongst magicians you realize they are not only ‘one of a kind’ but are well represented in the magic world. These men usually dress in black, are balding and have much younger wives. They also own large snakes and keep them in their living rooms in glass tanks covered with old bedding. At least that’s what Roy did. He kept an 8-foot python in this manner, I always referred to it as Monty but he never got the joke.
I had first met Roy in Brighton at a meeting of the Sussex Magic Circle where he was a member; although rumor had it he had long since stopped paying any dues. Roy was something of a rogue member amongst the group and was allowed the luxury of doing pretty well whatever he considered suitable. This seemed to suit Roy just fine. I had won the junior performers award three years running. Not quite as elite as it sounded as there were only two junior members in the club. The other junior was a kid slightly older than myself called Neil who was awkward and uncoordinated. These are not the best attributes for a magician and I quickly became the club favorite causing Neil to loose interest in magic altogether. My parents kept the silver plated cups I won in prominent display throughout their lives. I never won any awards again and they prized them mostly because they had been present to see me win them. No success I achieved in America seemed quite as real to them as those cups. After my second win Roy decided to take me under his wing. Nobody in the club actually said anything bad about Roy but there was a clear undercurrent of disapproval over the matter. Being under Roy’s wing didn’t amount to much more than spending the occasional evening in his rather dismal flat hoping to God the python was in its glass tank. Roy gave me advice, told me stories and sold me a few tricks he thought would improve my act. Even at my tender years I was aware these were probably tricks that Roy wanted to unload from his own repertoire. One of these props was a Lippencott box. What you may ask is a Lippencott box? Well I didn’t know either but according to Roy it was going to be the key to my future success as a magician. Without the rhetoric, it was a small wooden box with various hinges and hidden secrets that allowed an object to be introduced inside it secretly. The main use for this device was to allow the magician to apparently make a prediction about future events. There may have been other uses for the box but I could never determine them. I decided to debut this trick in conjunction with the Mid-Sussex Fair by predicting the headline of the local newspaper two weeks in advance of the actual paper being printed. A pretty cool piece of magic if all goes well.
With as much ceremony as a teenager could muster the box was signed, sealed and placed on display in the window of ‘Beaumont’s Menswear’. The box was to remain there in full view before being brought to the fair and opened during the festivities. There was nothing out of the ordinary in this stunt and many a magician has done it before and since. What made my prediction cause a stir was the timing. The night before the unveiling of my prediction the entire country was ablaze with the bolt from the blue news that the Beatles manager Brian Epstein had died. Was it suicide or natural causes, who knew, but everyone wanted to know the details so they could make a guess. The T.V. and newspapers went into overdrive and the entire country was intrigued by this event. Up until then the Beatles were the golden boys of Britain and nothing negative had cast a shadow over the mop tops.
Rather cunningly, I phrased my prediction carefully, and said that one of the Beatles or someone close to them would die. Sometimes it is more convincing to be a little vague rather than too accurate. I received a great deal of press for my stunt and enjoyed every word of it. I had studied Houdini and knew that publicity and press were the first steps to becoming a super star. Well it didn’t work out quite like that but I did learn a valuable lesson about the way of the world. If events work with you, then the sky is the limit and if they don’t, nothing amounts to much. If the headlines that day had read ‘New tax increases’ my moment in the sun would have been a lot less bright. The important lesson was about time-shifting though. By setting up my stunt two weeks in advance I was able to reap the dubious benefits of psychic powers. Although I didn’t know it at the time I had chanced upon the ‘One Ahead Principle’ in it’s most primitive form. R.I.P. Brian.

10.28.2005

A cough and a blink

By the time I was fourteen I had been performing magic for a few years and felt very ‘at home’ doing it. We were now living near the South Coast town of Brighton and I was a proud member of the Sussex Magic Circle. This was an oddball collection of magicians who met every other Thursday in a small hotel on the waterfront. We swapped stories and tricks and generally indulged our mutual love of magic. The president was a large and dull man named Stan. Stan was a mind reader or as it is known in the magic world a mentalist. I learned a very important lesson from Stan, whenever Stan was about to do the dirty work, or ‘work’ as it is known amongst magicians, he would cough. It wasn’t a big cough, just a little dry cough, but the moment you heard it you knew something had happened. This was the first time I really noticed the mechanical nature of a fellow human being. It became a fascination to me watching Stan perform his mentalism, just waiting for the dry little cough that signaled his guilty action. Month after month I watched him perform and cough. How could anyone be so stupid that they didn’t know that they were giving the game away by a small mechanical habit? Two years later when my first real mentor was teaching me my first real magic I got a shock.
“Nicky every time you link the rings you close your eyes!” said Ken. I quickly argued that this wasn’t possible and went over to the mirror to see if this was so. I ran thru the routine but never noticed any closing of the eyes at key moments. He is wrong I thought, then I realized the reason I couldn’t see my closed eyes was because my eyes were closed! It was like a light bulb turning on in my head. The reason we don’t notice mechanical reactions is because they are mechanical. Years later when I was to read Mr. Gurdjieff’s description of the mechanical nature of Mankind it made perfect sense to me. Whether it was Stan’s cough or my closed eyes we didn’t notice it because our actions (and especially our reactions) were mechanical as soon as we stopped thinking about them.
If we couldn’t see what we were doing it was because our eyes were closed or we were to busy coughing. There is a Zen story of a Japanese master who would ride his donkey around the village at a great speed searching for something. If any one asked him what he was looking for he would reply that he was looking for his donkey. It is generally interpreted to mean that when you use your nervous system to search for the ‘truth’ that your truth is the nervous system you are riding on and searching with. As a magician you spend many hours standing in front of a mirror trying to make the impossible look not only possible but ordinary. It takes a long time to observe the coughs and blinks that give us away. When you discover the little things that give away your mechanical nature then it leaves you open to observe the BIG things that we also do. It was a great lesson in being a magician and a truth that I would explore and understand more when the time was right.

10.25.2005

Remarkable Magicians #2. Houdini

Every young magician remembers his first ‘meeting’ with Harry Houdini or to give him his birth name Erich Weiss. My introduction to the greatest icon in the magic world was at the age of thirteen when my mother bought a book about him from a local library that was selling it’s excess reading matter. The book was called ‘Houdini: the Man who Walked Thru Walls’ and mum left it out for me to find on my return from school. Mum was away on her weekly trip to her Harley Street doctor in London. She visited a psychiatrist for my entire childhood and teenage years with no noticeable improvement to her condition, which was referred to in those days as manic depression. It wasn’t until after his death that she seemed to improve at all. Coincidence? I will be charitable and say maybe. She always tried to leave a little surprise or gift for me when she took the bus to his afternoon appointments at the busy Middlesex hospital in London. This time she had really picked a winner in Lindsey Gresham’s biography of this fascinating man. In fact to a young man already infatuated by the art of magic it was like pouring gasoline on a lit match! As soon as I found the book on the kitchen table I made a triple-decker peanut butter sandwich and began to devour them both. My mum’s paranoid nature began to assert itself however and she phoned me several times to making me promise not to experiment with any walking thru walls myself. This she assured me could be dangerous. After the forth or fifth call she began to believe me when I promised her I had no such plans!
Houdini was certainly an amazing man and like so many other young magicians I fell under his spell and decided that this was the life for me. As synchronicity would have it within that very week the BBC television network played the classic “Houdini” movie starring Tony Curtis. This brought the book to life for me in a very special manner. I was right up there in the screen with the tall, dark, handsome and debonair movie version of the great man. I was to later discover that as usual Hollywood got it all wrong and if you had to compare Houdini with anyone in a movie it wouldn’t be the loveable Tony Curtis, it would be closer to Joe Pesci in ‘Goodfellas’. Houdini was a short, rough, tough little fella’ with equal parts paranoia, delusions of grandeur and sheer guts! I was later to discover that Tony Curtis also wasn’t the godlike figure he seemed in the movies when I performed a private show for him and his guests at the Magic Castle. What started as a dreamlike experience sitting with the movie star and performing an hours worth of my very best close-up magic wound up as a major disillusionment when he stiffed me for my very modest fee! I discovered years later that he had a serious drug problem at the time which should have allowed me to forgive him, but hasn’t. The theory in Hollywood though is if you’re going to be stiffed it is better to be stiffed by a movie star than an average Joe!
My identification with Houdini was the final thing that sealed my fate as a professional magician. Houdini had been born in Budapest, was short, in great physical condition and dead. I on the other hand was a tall, overweight Londoner who was very much alive. You need lots of imagination to make it in magic though and the very fact that I identified with him at all was probably a large part of what I needed to follow in his deep footprints. The one piece of the Houdini myth that I didn’t understand was his fascination with the spirit world. It seemed strange and an unnecessary addition to his legend his continuing battles with spiritualist and spirit mediums but I forgave him this eccentricity. As for his weird insistence on continually rewriting and reinventing himself I certainly didn’t mind that, in fact I rather liked it. In future years my two major heroes shared this same character trait. I have even come to think that people who are consistent or tell too much of the truth about themselves are at the very best lazy. It seems to me that what we believe or create about our past is every bit as accurate as what actually happened. It is often more revealing and honest to the ‘I’ we currently are. If you can’t change your past then you don’t have much chance of shaping your future. Truth and time is like salt water taffy, it can be pulled and stretched into any shape without affecting it’s substance.

10.21.2005

The Thin White Duke and me.

In London I had a friend who was a true gentleman of the theater, his name was Ken Pitt. He was not only charming and cultured but had a fine and iconoclastic eye for fresh talent. He had helped discover James Dean in Hollywood, arranged tours for ‘Old Blue Eyes’ in the fifties and acted as publicist for Bob Dylan’s groundbreaking and earth shattering tours of England in the mid-sixties. Dylan certainly shook up English audiences, how many performers have had ‘Judas’ screamed at them from the crowd? That didn’t even happen to Judas! Ken was one Mr. Jones who certainly did know what was happening here. When I first met Mr. Pitt, he was nurturing the talents of an undiscovered cockney singer from the wrong side of town named Davey Jones. David later changed his last name on a Wild West whim to Bowie and the rest is rock ‘n roll history. I did meet David a time or two and spoke to him when he would occasionally answer the phone at Ken’s apartment. We never discussed the Spiders from Mars but explored our mutual admiration for Tony Newley. If you search out David Bowie’s first album you can listen to his very first single called the ‘The Laughing Gnome’ which sounds more like Newley’s early singles that it had any right too. Not only did David and I discuss Tony Newley but we also discussed Bob Dylan. How could two such different people have such identical thoughts about two such different people, it must have been blowin’ in the wind. Bowie discarded Ken Pitt as his show biz guru, and went on to become a worldwide phenomenon and I only ever saw him one more time. The truth of the matter is Ken freaked me out just a little too. All the wildly famous and brilliant people he had known and worked with, and the only time he really came to life was when as a young pre-war boy, he was introduced to Adolph Hitler. His eyes would take on a special sparkle as he discussed the sparkle in the Fuehrer eyes. I didn’t believe what David’s ex-wife Angie said about Ken but maybe, just maybe. Years later I was to perform at a private party for David at Los Angeles’ famous Ma Maison restaurant. Bowie had just completed a four-night engagement at L.A.’s massive Forum concert/basketball arena. I was hired to perform ‘wandering’ close-up magic for his guests. As not only a jobbing magician but also a giant fan of the thin white duke, I added what I considered a rather dashing touch to my performing outfit. I wore a bright red carnation in the buttonhole of my pinstripe suit. When I arrived at the restaurant I noticed that every waiter sported a similar botanical growth from his lapel. Being as socially contextually aware as the next guy I discarded my carnation in the kitchen trash can as discreetly and quickly as I could. Even in my twenties I was very aware of the social distinctions between a jobbing magician and an out of work actor, which is what most waiters are in Hollywood.
As you can imagine and after show party for David Bowie, in L.A. in the seventies was not your average audience. I performed card tricks for two thirds of Fleetwood Mac, Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Tom Waits, Bette Middler and Andy Kauffman. With a certain native cunning, I repeatedly performed a classic of magic known as the signed card in wallet. I figured with all those signed cards in my possession I would have a unique souvenir I would treasure for a lifetime. Which I did until it got lost during a house move a few years later.
My supreme moment arrived when Mr. Stardust himself joined the party somewhere after the midnight hour. I was standing in the middle of the room with my autographed deck in my hands, and in walked God (or Bowie, as he was known to this crowd) I was standing in the center of the room looking very much the non-star but performer that I was. A hush filled the room and everyone stared at me, well OK, they stared behind me at David. I turned around and was eye to miss matched eye of the man himself. David looked at me and said: “Don’t I know you?” “Nick.” I replied. “You must be, ah, ah, hum David?” He gave a thin smile, the conversations in the room continued. “ I was a friend of Ken Pitt, I explained to him. “Tonight, I’m just doing magic though.”
“No.” He said: “Not any more, just have fun and enjoy the party.”
It was a neat moment. Right up there with; “Just call me Nelson.” I put the cards back in my pocket. Sat down and had a drink. Let me rephrase that, I sat down at a table with Tom Waits and Bette Midler and started doing shots of rum with Tom. This was a game you could not win, but who wouldn’t want to try. The theatrical vision that has kept Bowie relevant and reinvented was probably born while watching the same plays I watched. Maybe it is time for me to revisit “East Side Story” and get in touch with my inner actor?

10.16.2005

A view from the stalls

As somebody who really, doesn’t believe much in political correctness I do hate the word Gyp when used as a verb to describe the act of deceiving or ripping of people. I don’t just hate it because this is what I do for a living but because I have a direct relative through my mother who was Queen of the Gypsies. These were very unusual Gypsies, for a start they didn’t hail from Romany but were Scottish Gypsies. Another thing that made them unusual in the Gypsy world was the fact that they lived in a house. They had decided generations ago to quit the road and settle down. Finding that the local shortbread, pubs and scones were good they settled down in a big bright pink house in the centre of town. The Queen ruled the roost and made the decisions. That’s why they called her Queen. One of the Queens was named Jessie Blythe and that was the first names given to my mother as homage to the woman who ran the original Big Pink.
Maybe it was the Gypsy blood that kicked in when I hit my teens. Until I was twelve years old I would never have dreamt of putting on a magic show. I was having way too much fun presenting my own, highly involved, one-man shows. I didn’t have huge audiences just family, friends and the occasional major production for my class at school. At the time these shows seemed wildly sophisticated looking back I suppose they weren’t. Though with a true performers ability to rewrite the past, there is still a part of my brain that believes they were. My shows ranged from theatrical parodies such as my extremely well received “East Side Story” to cutting edge productions like the one where two other kids walked around me in clockwise and anticlockwise ellipses. I had some theory about atoms circling and making conversation. Years later I found a book in our attic written by an aged relative Henry Lewin where he discussed the cognitive and emotional qualities of the sub-atomic. It was pretty racy intellectual stuff for the 1920’s, and much more in vogue today. Without a drop of Jewish blood in him Henry was also a proud English Israelite and fully believed the English were the missing tribe of Judah. I later revisited this theory and invented a family tree descended from the Samsonites. The Samsonites were a small tribe in the Middle East who wandered in the desert for many years with very little food or water but wonderful luggage. I suspect that Henry Lewin was a deeply influenced by Theosophy and the works of Madam Blavatsky.
I was much more interested in theatre and movies then than I was in magic. In fact I still am. Living so close to London City it was possible to catch many matinees and shows in the West End theatres of London. My mother always considered it just as good for my education to attend plays or movies rather than just attend school like other kids. I certainly never tried to alter her ideas and while it left great hulking gaps in my education it exposed me to sights and sounds that have remained vivid right up until this day.
I have soaring theatrical memories such as watching “Fiddler on the Roof” when it was a new musical throbbing with passion and not a twentieth generation hand me down. Some of my theatrical joys were subtler and only registered their treasures when reviewed from the future. Among these pleasures was seeing Barry Humphries play Mr. Sowerberry the undertaker in Lionel Bart’s “Oliver!” For those of us who hadn’t grown up in, Australia this was our first chance to observe Dame Edna Everage, Les Patterson and the other members of the Humphries Conglomerate.
My first hero was Anthony Newley, another member of the elite team that did for theater in the swinging sixties what the Beatles and Stones did for music. The Cockney chic and cheek that Newley and Bart brought to musical theater with shows such as; “Stop the World--I want to get off!” “Oliver”, “The Roar of the Greasepaint—The Smell of the Crowd” “Blitz!” and even the highly maligned “Twang” were a breath of fresh air. Collectively and creatively they removed the same cobwebs that Harold Pinter, Keith Waterhouse, Alan Bennett and John Osborne dispatched from the floorboards of the non-musical theatre. They shared the services of a brilliant young scenic designer Sean Kenney. Wild Irish and a natural maverick it was Kenney who inspired the strangely backhanded review in the London Times; “You come out of the theater whistling the scenery!” Oh yes, by jingo, something new was afoot in the four or five streets surrounding Piccadilly that constituted London’s West End. Not only were these new wave shows innovative and ground breaking, but each contained song after song that scaled the British pop charts. I reveled in these shows and saw them each as often as I could. I saw Newley and Bricusses’ final play “The Good Old Bad Old Days” fifty three times. Don’t look for objectivity here!

10.05.2005

Remarkable Magicians # 1. Mr. Miller

The only true card cheat I ever met, I think, was an elderly gentleman named Charlie. In his later years he was known as ‘Twinkle Toes” Miller due to his light-footed prowess on the dance floors of the cruise ships he performed on. Charlie was a superb comedy magician who could entertain royally with his unique renditions of the great old classics of magic.

He performed some tricks that were so old they were practically new again, many youngsters in magic including myself, had never even seen the “Rice Bowls” or the “Mutilated Parasol” let alone performed them. Charlie did them with a grace and twinkle in his eye that made them irresistible. I could have watched him for hours and I did, as he graced the stage of the “Magic Castle” with the charm of slightly rogue uncle. A magical legend in his own time, Charlie was a big man, larger than life, with a waistline to match. After Charlie suffered a mild heart attack his doctor gave him an ultimatum, lose weight or suffer the consequences! I think it was probably a tough decision for Charlie, who loved his food almost as much as he loved magic. This is where I got to know him a little better. As a callow young magician in his early twenties I realized how close I was to letting another of Magic’s greats disappear while I was only on a nod and smile basis with them. Heck, I wasn’t totally sure he really knew my name! So I plucked up my courage during Charlie’s recuperation and asked him if I could assist him in anyway. Charlie asked me if I had a car, when I said I did, we were off and running. He said he wanted to go to a favorite restaurant about five miles from his home and have lunch. He wanted me there not so much for the transportation or the company but to help keep him on his diet. I was ecstatic a luncheon date with Charlie was a serious step up in the magic world for me. I arrived at his Hollywood home at the appointed time and there he was waiting on the curbside, dressed up in
clothing that would have been suitable for weather that was twenty or thirty degrees colder.

We drove up Highland Avenue to a restaurant, which looked as if it had been frozen in time since Hollywood’s long gone golden era. The staff greeted Charlie with the excitement and respect that Jerry Lewis must receive when he walks into a cinema in Paris. We were ushered into a dark booth at the rear of the restaurant and menus were brought to the table. Charlie peered at the menu and ordered a very healthy meal. He ordered something from every part of the menu: soup, salad, pasta, and steak with baked potato. He then looked at me and asked if I thought he could add a desert to the list. I said that I thought that would be just fine. I realized that was what he wanted to hear, so I went right ahead and said it! I figured that this was the reason I was there in the first place. After washing down the meal with a couple of cups of coffee, Charlie leaned back in his chair and said; “This dieting thing isn’t too bad at all. That was a good meal!” He called over the waiter and I assumed he was going to ask for the check. However this was far from being his intention. “That was good,” he said. “Bring me the same again.”
That was exactly what happened. The waiter brought the exact same meal from soup to coffee and Charlie ate it again with obvious relish! Having found a healthy meal to his liking he was going to stick with it. While more than a little surprised, I was along for the ride, and second time around I took the opportunity to ask him a question or two about our mutual craft. I can’t say he said anything that I found too earth shattering at the time but in years to come I realized just how profound his thoughts were in spite of their simplicity. The secret to magic according to Charlie was to choose strong tricks, don’t be afraid to perform the classics, know everything you are going to do and do it well. Most important of all was to make sure people knew you were having fun doing it.
We repeated our luncheon ritual once more a few weeks later. It was identical, not only the two meals but he also ordered and ate the exact same food. I would have happily repeated the proceedings on a regular basis, but before I knew it the Charlie Miller recuperation was complete and “Twinkle Toes” Miller was back on a cruise tripping the light fantastic.
It was a pleasure to have spent some hours with this very special gentleman and I treasured our all too few hours together. I was delighted to realize I must have made some impact on him because in the future when we met at the “Castle” he always greeted me with a cheery; “Hi, Nick.” That was the kind of thing that made you feel like a million bucks when it happened.
There was just one thing that I couldn’t quite fully understand about Charlie. When observing him in his daily activities he had the slightly nervous and bumbling manner that suggested someone who, if not past his prime, at the very least must be having a bad day or at least wearing the wrong glasses. In all honesty for a man his age this should not have been any great surprise. What didn’t quite jibe with this was the fact that amongst the upper echelon of sleight of hand magicians, Charlie was considered to be one of the very finest card manipulators living. He was reputed to perform the smoothest second, middle and bottom deals in the business. This in spite of the fact that when you saw him handle playing cards he usually looked more likely to drop the deck than perform miracles with it.
After he had passed on, I gradually pieced together a very different picture of Charlie. It didn’t arrive all at once but bit by bit from people I would expect to know exactly what was what.

Aside from being the fine comedy magician that he was, able to produce a brimming mug of beer under your nose, Charlie was a gambler. Well maybe not a gambler, but what was known as a ringer in gambling circles. A ringer is someone who is introduced into private card games and can be relied upon to deal the right card at the right time. A good ringer can make a lot of money for a lot of people at the right time, as long as he doesn’t do it too often and above all if he doesn’t get caught doing it. Well the story I heard was that Charlie got caught at the wrong time with the wrong people with a ‘hold out’. Now, if you don’t know what a hold out is then you probably will never need to know. Keeping it brief, it is a mechanical device used to change out cards during a game. A genuine ‘hold out’ is something most magicians never see in their entire lives. They might see a magician’s version of this device, but a real one is a different story. It can range from a very expensive contraption, to a couple of skillfully used rubber bands. The story goes that after his cover was blown Charlie decided, like so many others, to take a cruise for his health. He just stayed away a little longer than most, and got a paycheck at the end of each cruise for publicly demonstrating his flawless performances of those classic magic tricks from the back pages of the magic world. Is this story true? I certainly couldn’t swear to it, but others do, people who knew Charlie a lot better than I did. Heck, I was just happy he knew my name. As I had sat with him, watching him eat his marathon meals, I knew he reminded me of someone. Only later on did I place the resemblance, it was my grandmother. They had the same slightly abstracted manner and bumbling quality that seemed out of place with their obviously razor sharp minds. Now as I told you before, I really don’t think my grandma was a cheat. And only once or twice a year does it run through my mind that Charlie was anything more than he appeared, but I sure would have loved to watch them as bridge partners. Maybe I would have known for sure. Maybe.

9.30.2005

Grandma stacks the deck

I wasn’t one of those kids that started doing magic tricks as soon as I could hold a deck of cards. I had a rather strange introduction to the art of sleight of hand.

My Grandmother was my first teacher in handling a deck of cards. She didn’t teach me magic, she taught me but how to cheat at cards. In her little ground floor apartment in Thames Ditton we would play the simple card games all children play. She showed me how to look at the bottom card and deal it when it was most useful. She taught me how to ‘lose’ an ace during a shuffle and ‘find’ it during the next game. These were simple things that seemed easy and fun, I was a good student, and it gave her enormous pleasure to watch me as I progressed in this dubious art. She was quite a piece of work my Granny, unusual by any standards, and stranger than I realized as a child. She had walked a fine line all her life, if the expression ‘pushing the envelope’ had existed during her lifetime then that is what her more generous contemporaries would have used to describe her. As a young red haired schoolgirl she attended a school for the daughters of distressed clergy. Which fairly accurately described her background and circumstances. She was expelled from this haven of gentility at the age of fourteen when she used a penknife to carve a word on the piano in the school hall. I don’t know what this word was, but it was scandalous enough that the entire rear of the piano had to be covered with thick cardboard to shield the refined sensibilities of the other daughters of distressed clergy. Both the piano and my Granny were quickly removed from the school. The piano was refinished and returned to the school, Granny did not return. By the time I knew her, she was no longer a wild young spitfire, she had developed chronic arthritis and was partially bedridden. Her confinement to bed seemed to end in the late afternoon, when after several pints of cider and a drop or two of scotch she faced the day. Or to be more accurate started the night. After she finished dressing she summoned a taxicab to take her to “The Angel” her local pub.
She remained there until the pub called ‘last order’ at eleven o’clock. The taxi was then re-summoned to transport her to her Bridge Club in the West End of London. This was when her day began in earnest, and she played bridge until two or three in the morning. This was high pressure, high stakes bridge with some of the best gamblers in the city. For many years whenever the movie actor Omah Sharif was in London filming she was his only bridge partner.

Mr. Sharif was more famous for his acting but was considered by those ‘in the know’ to be one of the most astute gamblers in the world. Finally her arthritis progressed to the point where an occasional visit to “The Angel” was all that remained of her nocturnal pursuits. Life must have seemed very dull in the small flat she shared with my Grandfather. If life was less bearable for her in these later years she was determined to make it equally so for Grandpa. There had been quite a scandal at the end of World War Two when Grandpa had failed to return from Egypt. He wasn’t injured or unable to return, he just didn’t want to and eventually my Great Uncle Odder was dispatched to deliver him back to England. I remember Grandpa as a sweet and kindly silver haired gentleman whose chief delight in life was chopping things up. It didn’t matter much to him what he chopped. His creed might well have been ‘I chop therefore I am’. He would spend most afternoons tidying things up in our back garden. Well in theory he was tidying but often he was chopping up useful and sometimes essential items, he once chopped up my cricket stumps and bat. He would then spend the remainder of the day stoking a large bonfire at the rear of the garden. Then he would come to the backdoor of our house, remove his boots, come into the kitchen and drink strong tea and munch on burned toast.

When he finished his meal he put his boots back on, secured his flapping trouser cuffs with bicycle clips and cycled home.
Looking back, I think that eating chestnuts smothered in butter and cheating at cards with Grandma were the roots of my magical life. I don’t believe she was a card sharp herself, however, she certainly knew how and what to do and she wanted to share it with someone. When you have knowledge then you must share it is a rule of the Universe. Maybe that is really what life is all about and your little piece of the hologram contains the entire big picture for someone else. She certainly was a character my Granny though.

9.24.2005

Mr. Riddle and Me.

During my first twenty-five years in magic only once did I think about giving it up and doing something else. A call from the Magic Castle had put me in touch with a producer who resided in the Laurence Welk Towers in Pacific Palisades. I never did discover whether Mr. Welk’s Towers involved champagne and bubbles, but it was a good indication that this was going to be a fairly conservative event.

Getting a referral call from the Castle it was like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, you never knew what you were getting. The only thing you did know was that Jean, the human nerve center of this Mecca of magic, had quoted a fee. The fee never varied it was always two hundred dollars. It didn’t matter whether it was entertaining a thousand people in a ballroom, spending a month as a magical adviser on a movie or entertaining six people with a few card tricks at a restaurant. The fee was two hundred dollars. Sometimes you were working far below the market value and other times you made a killing. This gig fell somewhere between the two and while it didn’t make me wealthy I certainly made a professional killing.

Every year Ross Perot gave a banquet for the returned prisoners of war from Vietnam. It was a nice thing to do for a group in which even the casual observer could notice severe stresses and tensions. This year Mr. Perot had decided that a magician would be just the thing to complete the bill. It was quite a bill. The guest of honor was ex-governor and future president Ronald Reagan, in those days Ross Perot was still a king maker in the political field and not the candidate! This year the after dinner show featured: Carol Burnett, Edgar Bergen, Mike Curb’s Congregation, Sammy Davis Jr. and Tony Bennet. Our musical director for the evening was Nelson Riddle, who brought along with him his forty-two piece orchestra. I guess I was there for the star power. The most intimidating part of this was not having to follow the great Sammy Davis Jr. who had to leave early for his evening performance in the revival of “Stop the World I Want to Get Off” at the Schubert Theatre in Century City. No, what stopped my world was doing a band rehearsal with the great Nelson Riddle. I had an eclectic taste in music giving equal attention to Bob Dylan, Velvet Underground, Rod McKuen and Frank Sinatra.

When it came to Sinatra and Nelson Riddle no one said it better than Van Morrison; “When Frank Sinatra sings with Nelson Riddle strings, take a vacation!”
When the time came for my band call I walked onstage to Mr. Riddle who was seated on a piano stool in front of his grand piano and what seemed like an endless orchestra. To say I was nervous would be like saying Mike Tyson was aggressive. In my hand were my band parts or ‘dots’ as they are known in the biz. I had always been very proud of the jazzy arrangement of “Rule Britannia” that a bandleader from a cruise ship had written for me. There were band parts for ten instruments and some of these parts I had never even heard. However looking at this gigantic orchestra they seemed very, very inadequate.

“Mr. Riddle….” I began.
“Call me Nelson.” He replied. I really appreciated his gesture but in all honesty it was all the nerve I could summon just to call him Mr. Riddle. Nelson looked at my meager stack of music and smiled. “Nick, unless it is very important to you, maybe you can leave your intro and bows music to me.” He said with a friendly grin. “I am sure I can come up with something for the band.” I agreed gladly and that was the end of my band call. The band was itching to start their rehearsal with Tony Bennet. The mutual love affair between Mr. Bennet and the musicians was so apparent during his rehearsal it gave you a real understanding what the word harmony really means.
When the Show began that night I was standing in the wings, wearing my tuxedo with a fashionably frilly shirt, guarding the table that my props were placed on. People did speak to me but I really don’t know who or what they said. I listened as Sammy Davis sang several songs by another of my heroes Anthony Newley.

Sammy did some shtick, danced a little and then was gone. My turn. I stood in the wings and for the first time wondered what music would bring me out onstage. This was the summer of “Star Wars” and everywhere you went the movie was in your face; the characters, actors, images and best of all the, wonderful soundtrack by John Williams. When I was introduced, Nelson Riddle and his entire ensemble broke into the fanfare from Star Wars. “DA DA DADA DA DAAAAH DA….” Every single one of those forty-two musicians was playing his heart out. Strings were soaring, timpani was booming, horns were blaring and best of all there was ‘Nelson’ sweeping up and down the keyboard tying it all together. Just for a moment I stood there in the wings, took a deep breath, and realized that in my short career there had never been a moment like this. I also realized that there probably would never be another quite as good again. Just for a moment it ran through my mind that I should just not bother walking out onstage. I could have quit right then and there because it just doesn’t get any better than that, right there at the top of the mountain. Then I took another deep breath and walked out onstage.

9.23.2005

The sleeping giant

A few miles down the coast from Portrush was the famous Giants Causeway. This natural wonder is a giant rocky glimpse into the mathematical mind of creation. Millenniums before, molten lava had trickled to the coastline and upon contact with the cooling waves of the water had formed a gigantic ridge polygon shapes. These columns range in diameter from fifteen to twenty inches and measure up to eighty feet in height.

The stones had five to seven irregular sides and these columns make a magnificent sight. It is almost impossible to gaze at the Giants Causeway and not ponder on the mathematical nature of the creative forces. The entire structure continues under water to the tiny Scottish Island of Staffa and end up in an area known as Fingals Cave. Local folklore has it that the entire structure had been created, for reasons of Love or Theft, by a giant named Finn MacCool.
As you approached the Causeway along the rugged Irish coastline if you looked away from the sea, to the neighboring mountains, you could see the Sleeping Giant. Well, you had to use a touch of imagination and squint a bit, but there he was! A series of mountains stretched across the skyline looking very much like an immense figure stretched out across the hilltops. A gigantic rocky figure; looking like he had wandered out of a storybook, had one to many pints of Guinness, and was sleeping it off before returning to his fairytale chums.
Local legend had the giant guarding the entrance to the Causeway, but to me it looked more like an afternoon nap that had been frozen in stone.
My mother was what is now known as a ‘rock hound’ and loved to collect interesting stones and rocks during our family travels. To her just wandering around this 50 million year rock formation was seventh heaven and a site to be visited more than just once. In fact on the last day of our visit, my parents decided to make one last pilgrimage to the Causeway to photograph it yet again for future family holiday slide shows. We passed the Giant on our right, and then took the small uneven road that branched out towards the sea and wound its way down to the foot of the Causeway. Just before you arrived at the base of formation was a dirt-covered field that served as a parking lot.
We got out of our car and started to walk towards the Causeway. Along the path was a wooden bench; sitting on it was a local who seemed to be totally involved in keeping his briar pipe lit. My dad greeted him in a friendly manner and we began a typical tourist conversation about weather and the uniqueness of the Causeway. “Did you know?” he said. “How the Causeway began?” we listened as he explained some things we knew and some we didn’t. One of the things that we had not heard was that this entire formation of seven sided stones was based around the very first rock created as the stone had crystallized. “That’s the keystone.” He said “The magic rock that brought the others to life. It is the only one that has six sides instead of seven.” My Dad asked him where it was so that he could add a picture to his all ready extensive collection of Giants Causeway photos. “Ah,” he replied, “ A magic rock it is, and can only be found by a magician.”
“Oh, I can find it!” I said, and walked away towards the heart of the Causeway. After climbing and scrambling a while I stopped at one section and called out to my parents; “It’s right here!”

Then I looked down around my feet and there it was. A solitary six sided stone amidst a jig saw puzzle of seven sided ones. It didn’t look much different from the others, except for the obvious and indisputable fact that it only had six sides. Well it took my parents a while to make there way over to where I was standing. When they arrived they counted the edges of the stone and agreed that there was definitely one side less than the standard seven sides of its neighbors. My father was a chartered accountant or as he would be known in America a CPA and numbers were his game. He walked around this six-sided oddity counting the sides of all the other stones and soon my mother joined him. I remained where I was, standing on the Magic Stone. I had said I would find it, and found it I had. Now, I would like to tell you I had walked directly to it but the uneven terrain made any such thing impossible. There I was standing on the rock with a happy smile on my face. My parents wandered further and further away somewhat bewildered to realize that this did indeed seem to be the only six sided stone within the geometrically arranged mass of almost identical seven sided ones. After a while, they tired of the search and rejoined me and decided to take my photograph standing on my discovery. There were only two shots left in the camera and Dad, after his customary lengthy preparations used up the remainder of the roll shooting downwards on my feet and the magic keystone beneath me.

Time was passing and the sun was sinking fast in the sky and we had to leave to catch the car ferry that would return us to the English mainland. As we were making our way back across the rocks towards the rustic car park, on an impulse I said; “Let me go back and look at it one more time.” I retraced my steps, but, I could not find that stone. I had so confidently walked to it when I didn’t know where it was but now I could not find it for the life of me. My parents joined the search and they too were baffled. Eventually the darkening sky made us abandon our efforts and returning to our car we completed our journey. The ferry took us away from that enchanted country to English soil, and since that time I have yet to return to the Emerald Isle.
The pictures never came out. They were the only exposures on the entire roll of film that did not develop into prints. Maybe, it was too dark? I don’t think so. When I look back after forty odd years I am more than ever convinced that something different had happened. Years after the event I read about the alchemists strange and mysterious Philosophers Stone that shows itself when it is ready to do so and vanishes just as quickly. The stone that I stood on certainly didn’t look like it could change into gold. All it had was one missing side, and that was all that it needed to transform its surroundings. Looking back it wasn’t that I really wanted to find it, it was more of a feeling that I knew I could. Would a photograph have made this experience more real for the three of us? No, we didn’t need it because we were there. One thing for certain within a couple of years I did start working on my magic and have been a magician ever since. Coincidence? Maybe.

9.22.2005

Look in to my eyes........

Magic was the furthest thing from my mind when I accompanied my parents on our annual holiday to Portrush in Southern Ireland. It was your typical family holiday with ice creams, Cadburys flakes and speedboat rides. The thrill to me was not sandcastles, bucket and spades or swimming in excessively cold water. No, it was here I had my first taste of live show business. My epiphany came in the form of a hypnotist named Edwin Heath.

He had a full evening show in the local theatre just blocks away from our hotel. I loved that show and everything about it! Men barked like dogs, women imagined that their clothes had disappeared and all manner of mayhem was unleashed twice nightly. The piece de resistance (which was not, as Mr. Heath pointed out, a French girl who struggles!) was when an audience member was suspended between two chairs while the hypnotist sat on his unsupported stomach. This feat amazed me and seemed unexplainable unless you believed in his strange and wonderful powers. Little did I know that this trick was to come back and haunt me in the years ahead. Again and again I begged my parents to take me to the show. Spoilt child that I was, again and again they obliged me. I sat in the dark and dusty auditorium enough times to realize that the members of the audience that appeared onstage were different every time and there was no sign of trickery. It appeared to me then, as I know fully believe, that it was indeed hypnosis. At the beginning of the show Mr. Heath performed a test with the entire audience to select those most susceptible to his hypnotic skills. This test involved clasping your hands together and by his persuasion being unable to unclasp them. I tried it and got suitably stuck. I dashed to the front of the theatre, but when I went onstage for the unclasping I was no sooner unstuck than I was returned to my seat. As a hypnotist, he was no idiot and the last thing he wanted was a ten-year-old boy onstage. This was my first experience with hypnosis, but in years to come another professional hypnotist would reach through the years and do more than just entertain me.

During this same vacation I also watched a movie that would be a huge influence in years to come. It wasn't so much the movie of Elmer Gantry that knocked me for a loop but the tour de force performance by Burt Lancaster in
the title role. This is a performance that isn’t afraid to ask more questions than it cares to answer. I have now included a form of faithealing in my show for nearly thirty years and each time I feel a little like Elmer Gantry doing Edwin Heath’s act. I guess since I’ve been doing it for thirty years I must like the feeling.

9.20.2005

The start of the begining.

It is not always easy to say when something happens. It is more accurate to say when you notice it has happened. My first indication that I was going to be a magician happened when I was ten years old. I was a very normal kid. My father was British and my mother Scottish. Which made me half English and half Scottish so I should have grown up hating myself! However that was not the case, I was a very happy, non-athletic boy with a love of reading and playing elaborate imagination games with myself. Born in 1952, I was very much pre-computer. For me if a game came to you in millions colors it meant you were playing outside. Dungeons and Dragons were very much in the future.

As far as role-playing went, to me it meant pinning a towel to your back and pretending to be Superman. In fact Superman was very much my hero. A snappy dresser and all round good guy. However due to the non-athletic qualities that helped define my bodily being I was, unlike my hero, more likely to move faster than a tall building and be shot by a speeding bullet.
My earliest exposure to magic was a hand puppet on television called Sooty, who along with his friend Sweep, performed magic shows that went desperately wrong. This seemed to exasperate the elderly gentleman who always hovered at an arms length from them. I don’t remember much of what they did but it was loud, fun and messy! That was just fine by me. When Sooty waved his magic wand it would often cause bodily injury to the elderly gentleman who’s name I later discovered was Harry Corbett. The magic words Sooty used to achieve his grand illusions were; “Abracadabra”, “Hey Presto” and my favorite “Hocus Pocus Fish Bones Choke Us!” To this very day I gleefully use the “Fish Bones Choke Us” in my magic show and it still gets a good chuckle. This was the extent of my early exposure to the art of prestidigitation and as far as I remember it left me with no burning desire to grow up as either a magician OR a hand puppet. No, I had it pretty clear in my mind that I was going to emerge from childhood as a caped crusader who could change outfits in a phone booth and became unrecognizable when I put on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Several years later when it was discovered that my short sightedness necessitated the full time use of horn-rimmed glasses, my dreams of being a super hero were dashed. Until the advent of contact lenses I was stuck as Clark Kent.