Lots of boys go through a magic stage. They get a kid’s magic set of simple tricks, they pick up a card trick or two, or they figure out how to make a coin disappear into thin air. Then there’s another kind of kid who takes it a step further and starts haunting the magic shops. For me they were on K Street in Sacramento, Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, Cannery Row in Monterey and in the back of Thinker Toys in Carmel. Trick by trick I evolved into what is known as an apparatus magician. An apparatus magician is a magician who uses rigged items to present illusions: empty boxes that produce live animals, scarves that change colors or disappear into your hand, the Chinese wands, the linking rings, a magic table with secret compartments, the flying cane. As the boy amasses his collection of illusions he reads all the books in the library about the Great Blackstone and Harry Houdini, or tricks one can do with ordinary household items. He never misses a David Copperfield TV special and is in the audience when the magician plays Lake Tahoe.
When I was in elementary school my Grandparents hired a local teenaged magician to entertain the family on Christmas eve. He had a lovely assistant in costume and he was properly decked out in a tuxedo. He had doves and a black velvet magic table and plenty of colorful balls, scarves, ropes, boxes and wonderful toys. I wanted them all. I wanted to be him. I might have camped out in front of his house and bugged him to death if I had any idea where he lived. That magic show on Christmas eve showed me that magic wasn’t just for TV variety shows, but it was for anyone and I might some day put together my own magic act and perform at parties.
My brother Mark had a lovebird named Sam because we were told it was a boy. Then one day Sam laid an egg and he was Samantha. That bird was unruly and chased people around the living room. He liked to land on shoulders and in my case bite a mole I had on my neck. When I was in junior high school I had collected enough good tricks to put on a decent magic show and managed to land my first birthday party gig with Mark as my assistant and Sam stuffed into the box that seemed to be empty. We always had to prearrange for a place to sneak in the bird so the party guests wouldn’t see it and clear the place of dogs and cats. The trick was so much more amazing when you didn’t know a bird had arrived to the party. Sam was usually pretty good about just hopping out of the box and waiting for Mark to scoop him up and rush him off stage and back to his cage. However, on a couple of occasions Sam embarrassed us by flying off into the room and landing in an unreachable spot. We would have to stop the show while Mark climbed around the room trying to capture Sam.
We always did the bird trick first so that Sam wouldn’t be tucked into the box for too long and then the show could continue without any worry about mishaps. I can’t even remember the entire program now, but it included the linking rings, the Chinese wands, several amazing things done with an egg coming and going, three or four magic scarf tricks, a set of boxes that covered cutouts of rabbits that magically hopped from one container to the other, pouring the pitcher of milk into the newspaper cone and disappearing into thin air. Mark stood by to hand me things and I worked off a magic table that I built myself from directions I found in a magic book. By the time I was 16 the show had grown to its final version, which probably lasted a half hour. We didn’t advertise, but word got around and we were asked to perform at various parties––both for adults and kids.
I had seen David Copperfield do an amazing trick with a floating cane. You knew there was a string or a wire, but you just couldn’t figure out the physics of how it was attached based on what seemed to be incredible movements of the cane. One of my shops had the trick and I snatched it up, but the problem with it is that you’ve got to have theatrical lighting to help out the illusion. The close quarters of a living room performance make the illusion impossible to achieve. My last magic show was also my first chance to perform the trick because it was going to be in a large school classroom and I could control the light. I brought along a portable clip light with a blue bulb in it and had my friend Anna help out by turning off the regular lights and aiming the blue light at me as I danced the cane through the air all around me. This was my finale at that particular performance and the last time I performed that same magic act that I had been doing all through high school with little variation. It was performed around the last week of high school after Mark and I had driven all over the hills of El Dorado County with Sam swinging on his perch in cage on the back seat––his little bell that he liked to hit with his head ringing away (sometimes he stuck his head under the bell and wore it like a hat)––bringing our little magic show into living rooms for several years. Then all at once I went off to college to study theatre and left magic behind.
I still think it would have been fun to pursue life as a magician, but I never researched the path one takes and couldn’t imagine how to advance my interest. Magic was not a subject I ever came across in the college catalogs in my high school’s career center. It has to be more than moving to Las Vegas, but that would probably have been part of it. Had it been possible to be a magic major I might have done it. Looking back on it now I realize that I was trapped in a certain limited routine and since the path towards a career in theatre was apparent, it was natural that I would take that path. I was happy with my tight and simple thirty minute show and never branched out into sawing girls in half or trying to make the Statue of Liberty disappear. I liked the performance aspect of it the most and studying theatre in college fulfilled that aspect as well as simply being more practical. There is nothing practical about becoming a magician, but a few people make a fat living at doing just that. My grandfather loved magic shows and perhaps harbored secret dreams of making elephants disappear. I think he would have liked to see me become a professional magician.
My magic shops are all gone now. The one on K Street in Sacramento went when that street was turned into a pedestrian mall. I don’t think the changes to K Street had anything to do with it, but it was just that magic and gag shops no longer fascinated boys the way they used to. The other magic shops I regularly visited were in heavy tourist spots and hung on a bit longer, but none of them are around now. Video games had come along, which was the first step towards an era of electronics that have made many things of science fiction become science fact, but along the way the card tricks and the magic wands lost their allure. The casino circuit still supports a handful of magicians, so there is an audience that wants some of that good old hokum on occasion, but did you notice that somewhere around the time of the Apple computer that David Copperfield stopped showing up on TV?
Presenting the Chinese wands during the last magic show in 1986.
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