It’s a Friday night in Indian Orchard, and, though it may seem unlikely, in a prosaic row of shops on a busy, charmless street, there’s magic in the air. The months-old Brick and Mortar magic shop is small, but as any examination of magic quickly reveals, it’s not about how many flashy devices are on hand, it’s about good performance. One can find necessary gimmicks galore here, but tonight the real work of magic takes center stage. Tonight, the Society of American Magicians Assembly 17 is crowding in to eat pizza, do a little business and perform for each other. This is ground zero, where the real, difficult work of aspiring magicians begins—you don’t get a television special for buying a fake finger chopper or a couple of sponge bunnies.
Magicians have always filled a peculiar role, no less so in an age that doesn’t put much stock in “real” magic. As Brick and Mortar owner Mark Thompson points out, doing the impossible is an age-old tradition—Moses turned a staff into a snake, and even parted the Red Sea. You can’t buy that, even at his shop.
Many was the potentate who fell prey to a magician who crossed the line between entertainment and confidence game, claiming to turn iron into gold or predict the future. That murky crossover has a lot to do with why magic, even when we know it’s not “real,” has such power. People, no matter the sophistication of the age, seem hard-wired to listen to that whisper in the ear that maybe you really can follow the card and walk away with your winnings.
The Golden Age of magic, which peaked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, saw the rise of the modern kind of magician, a performer of wonders for their own sake, illusions as entertainment. It was a great time for such wonders—the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution offered great possibilities for dazzling and fooling. The top hat and tails complemented by a devilish goatee is a cliche from that age, when performers like Robert-Houdin and Hermann the Great offered an aristocratic, professorial air as successor to the robed mage of old.
For me, magic has been a longtime interest, one I wanted to return to in earnest. It wasn’t readily apparent that, beyond the more easily found clowns and kid-show performers, the Valley is home to a few conjurors who are making a go of bringing the magic tradition to audiences of all ages. But after a long and circuitous route, I found them, right there in Indian Orchard.
At first, my searching turned up a whole world of magicianly pursuits on the Web, where magic shops abound and a lot of sites have sought the balance between offering information and protecting that same information from the eyes of the merely curious. Magicians don’t enjoy the exposure of hard-won methods, many of which require tremendous dedication to acquire and perform with the necessary exactitude. The answer for many websites is requiring tests of conjuring knowledge and history to enter the inner sanctums, or a minimum number of postings that certainly must deter casual visitors.
For those who like magic but don’t care to learn the specifics (which, to oversimplify, boil down to endless practice, hard-won confidence and old-fashioned performing skill), there’s still some magical entertainment on the Internet, though it’s surprisingly hard to find. Youtube, chock-full of amateurs who give a bad name to conjuring and make life hard for those whose methods they unwittingly expose, is also home to some treasures, but the research required to turn up those treasures makes it daunting. The real thing ought to be experienced firsthand anyway, to get that tingle of strange wonder that appears when the impossible is demonstrated in person.
In order to find out more about the state of sleight-of-hand, up-close conjuring in the age of TV magicians and large-scale illusionists and performers like David Blaine, David Copperfield and Siegfried and Roy, I turned to a couple of performers who are much admired by those in the know, Austin, Texas-based Cody Fisher and New York City-based Harry Lorayne.
Fisher is an up-and-comer who makes a living in the fashion of contemporary magicians. In the Golden Age, good magicians could make a living travelling from theater to theater with a boxcar full of equipment. These days, good magicians often must have several brands of performance, from up-close magic and strolling shows to full stage shows, and they offer them in venues from restaurants to corporate parties, and even the occasional theater. The other current necessity for magicians is a doing a brisk business in the marketing of their tricks (or “effects,” as they’re more commonly known among magicians) via eBooks and DVDs, a vital side of the business most of us don’t see.
Fisher is an engaging performer whose style seems equal parts confident skill and humor delivered with a Conan O’Brien-like style. His skills are formidable enough to have won him awards, and he’s also won Columnist of the Year in MUM magazine (publication of the Society of American Magicians). He’s a great example of the contemporary heir to the traditions of Houdini, Carter the Great and the like. Like many, he started in his living room, performing for family and friends. His one mishap as a youngster involved the ill-advised setting off a smoke bomb indoors, which, he says, left a lingering stink of sulphur.
Now that he’s making a living (sans smoke bombs), Fisher approaches magic as an entertainer first, a sleight-of-hand artist second. In a recent Advocate interview, Fisher said, “If somebody asks me what I do, I say, ‘I’m an entertainer.’ If they keep asking, I say I use comedy magic in my show.”
He knows that things have changed for magicians, and has a lot to say about why. “Back in the day, more people were able to do theater-type shows. I guess there wasn’t that much entertainment,” says Fisher.
“I think today’s audiences are harder to fool, and also there’s just so much stuff to do today. Doing a theater show—there’s just so much competition. The performers back then could have a six-month run. Here, on any given night, they’re choosing from a movie, a football game,” says Fisher. “The only theater shows that exist like that are in Las Vegas. At a show for a company, they’ve been to Vegas, and that’s what they want to compare it to—dancing, showgirls, beautiful sets. You just need to give them so much more than they were used to back then.”
Fisher and others have had to adapt to that kind of expectation by choosing what they perform very carefully. “I take my magic seriously, and I make sure the effects are as fooling as they could possibly be. You’re not going to find them on Google,” Fisher says.
The current crop of big-scale performers like David Copperfield hasn’t affected close-up performers like Fisher so much, since audiences can’t reasonably expect a performer on a small stage to vanish anything huge. “But what has changed,” says Fisher, “Is that David Blaine and Criss Angel are doing stuff on a much smaller scale. What they do is fantastic, but the problem with that for full-time performers is that when there’s a magic special on, we can look and know there’s editing involved or a forgiving angle. But people watch that and they see Criss Angel float a girl right in the middle of somewhere public. In their minds that trick started from the second he walked over,” says Fisher. “But there was major construction done weeks before! I show up for my show, and people ask, ‘Can you do the one where you float a girl right here?’
“There’s a fine line there. You don’t want to expose how something is done. But there’s part of you that you almost can’t live up to the expectation. I say, ‘I don’t perform that particular illusion. There’s a fantastic illusion I do, a different levitation, in my show.”
On the other hand, Fisher says, “I have to give David Blaine credit. Even after years of Copperfield specials, no one came up to me and talked about close-up magic. David Blaine did his first special, and the next day I went in to do my strolling gig. I had so many people ask me about David Blaine, and they were excited about card tricks and coin tricks. More than any magician to date, he has popularized close-up magic. He’s done more in 2 years than anyone else has done in the past 100 years,” says Fisher.
Of the new crop of close-up performers like Blaine and Angel, he says, “They are getting people excited about everyday magic, even though a lot of what they do can only be done on television. But if you’re using a mirror or trap door, that’s just one method—TV is just one of the methods. If I had a television show, I would use everything possible, too.”
The secret to the success of television performers and up-close workers is the same according to Fisher, and his performances reveal that he too employs it. “If you watch a Copperfield special, the effects can be easily explained in one sentence—’Oh my God, he made the statue disappear. He took a quarter, bit it in half and blew it back on.’ The method is trivial. The effect is the important thing. If you’re going to make your living, the effect is everything.”
When you watch Fisher perform, that’s just what you see—simple, astounding feats, delivered in a friendly, down-to-earth way. It’s a potent combo for audiences which would make him a good performer by old or new standards.
Where Fisher is a fine example of the contemporary magician, Harry Lorayne is a fine example of the performers who inherited the traditions of the Golden Age and adapted them to mid-century audiences. Lorayne is still renowned, and still passing on his highly sought-after methods to magicians—early editions of some of his magic books can cost a few hundred dollars. He also wrote and edited volume seven of an eight-volume set of magic books that many magicians consider the most vital works written for conjurors.
Though Lorayne made his reputation as a card magician, he still makes most of his living from a field that informed his magic and the rest of his life, memory work. Most people know him as a memory expert who’s brought his impressive methods to television (including the Tonight Show in Johnny Carson’s day), to big-selling method books, and to celebrities. A conversation with Lorayne is likely to turn to his memory work as often as to magic, but it’s all closely related in his case. (For more info on his memory methods, visit harrylorayne.com.)
He is a fast-talking New Yorker and a huge personality (“I’m an original dead-end kid, born by the East River,” Lorayne says). A conversation with Lorayne gives one the feeling that he could talk you into believing you’d witnessed a magic trick over the phone—I checked my pockets after the interview, half-expecting to find a signed card.
Lorayne stumbled upon some different ways of looking at things early on. “When I was in the early grades, when I was 8 or 10, my teacher, Mrs. Goldfisher—I’ll never forget her—she’d give us tests on yellow rectangular pieces of paper numberd from one to 10 about things we had learned or studied. We had to bring these papers home so one parent could sign them. My father, who died when I was 12, he signed them and I got failing grades and he would punch me,” he says.
“My classmates were all passing, and I was stamped stupid,” says Lorayne. That led him to the library. “I had to break through cobwebs, but in one corner I found some books on memory, dating back, some of them, to the 17th century. I was 10 and a half, 11 years old. I couldn’t understand 99.9 percent of what I was reading. I didn’t realize I was coming up with seminal ideas. I twisted and changed those ideas just to solve that problem—how do I remember the capitol of Maryland is Annapolis? I started to get 100s on those tests. That stopped my father hitting me.”
That work took him far: “Many years ago, I was in a restaurant with Mel Brooks, and there were a bunch of guys standing around with bulges under their left shoulders. Mel was ahead of me, and I was paying the check,” says Lorayne. “There was Mel talking to Colin Powell, and Colin Powell said, ‘Harry Lorayne!’, threw his arms around me and said, ‘You made me a general.’ There are so many politicians who use my systems whose names I cannot mention. Some of them have fantastic memories now cause they used my system. If people knew they had great memories, they couldn’t keep saying, ‘I don’t recall!'”
Magic came along early, too. Lorayne explains that he and many of his friends hung around in a park with a counselor after school. “One day it was raining and he took all of us into one room,” says Lorayne. “He didn’t know what to do inside, and he did a card trick and he changed my life. I was a shy kid. I never spoke unless I was spoken to, and I never made eye contact. I was too shy to ask him how he did it. I didn’t realize in those days you didn’t ask a magician how something was done. They wouldn’t tell you. I thought, ‘God, if I could do that, I could do anything!'”
When he didn’t find cards at home to work with, he came up with a simple solution. “I stole milk bottles. I can say it now and I won’t get arrested. The milkman would take the empty bottles and leave full bottles, and you got a two- or three-penny deposit. I did that until I had 18 or 20 cents to pay for the cheapest deck of cards I could find. I figured the trick out and I came up with 14 different ways to do the darned thing.
Then Lorayne brought memory work to magic. “One of the first memory tricks was memorizing a deck of cards. The trick was I’d let anybody shuffle the cards and call them off and tell them I would memorize the cards. And they’d call a number, and I’d tell them which card was at that number. That was the first memory card trick.”
As a magician, Lorayne came to rely on sleight of hand as his strong point rather than pure memory, and that has solidified both his reputation among magicians and his ties to the older, pre-television world of magic (although he became one of the first magicians on television around 1950). “I thought in those days that magic would be my life,” says Lorayne. “But then I realized the memory work was more important— magicians followed the dog acts. They were not very important at all. It wasn’t until [magician] Doug Henning that changed. If it wasn’t for Henning, there wouldn’t be any David Blaine or David Copperfield.”
How has TV changed the role of magic and magicians? “It’s changed magic in that magicians can become names,” says Lorayne. “When I was young a few were names—Cardini, Dunninger, there was Houdini, obviously. They were known, but they never became stars. TV had to change magic.”
Years later, Henning (who, Lorayne says, as a kid used to follow him around in New York) made it to Broadway, and Lorayne remembers his reaction: “Are you serious—magic on Broadway? Get outta here! That changed the concept of magic—there are always hills and valleys. Now we’re on a hill again with David Blaine.”
The exposure of television audiences to magic has made a difference in what audiences expect, says Lorayne. “They are demanding more impressive effects. I’m not interested in illusions. People ask me, ‘Gee Harry, can you do that stuff? Yeah I can, but I don’t want to.”
But he, unlike most aspiring magicians, has the kind of reputation that allows for easily deflecting such requests. About that reputation, Lorayne says, “Modesty is becoming a drag. I get the vision of somebody telling Frank Sinatra he’s a good singer and Sinatra saying, ‘aw, gee thanks.'”
Lorayne circles things back to the premise I keep finding when it comes to magic. It’s not about learning tricks or even sleight of hand, though they’re necessary. When asked what makes for a really good effect, Lorayne says, “It’s not good to answer that—it’s up to the individual, to the audience. … Somebody will hand me a deck and I’ll do an hour of ace tricks—there goes the modesty again. I’m a performer. I don’t care what kind of tricks I’m doing.”
And that’s really the key. It’s also why even mind-boggling, camera-editing tricks won’t kill off the ancient power of the magician, amazing a couple of spectators at a time.
Back in Indian Orchard, the members of the Society of American Magicians Assembly 17 crowd in. After some preliminary business, the performers offer their best, one at a time, most of them making an impromptu stage of wherever they happen to be standing. There’s a little of everything—handkerchiefs pulled from a drum-like contraption, some card vanishing. Ed Kazar offers the most theatrical costume, adorned with a fez and a bright red vest with a white flower. He knots rings into a rope, then makes them seemingly melt right through with the aid of a couple of assistants. One of the magicians who is a regular performer, Jonas Toutant, offers an attempt at the “Card on Ceiling” routine, often a crowd-pleaser.
It’s at such gatherings that magicians become comfortable with the strange acts they’re learning. It might seem that a bunch of people with heads stuck in magic books would be stuffy, maybe even awkward. But those who would be conjurors can’t be shy—most everyone one here is willing to chat, and willing to break out a trick or two. It’s a surprisingly amiable atmosphere, a comfortable setting in which to learn the astounding. It seems like the only kind of atmosphere where the passing on of old traditions and the fostering of new performers could work.
Thompson’s Brick and Mortar business partner, Michael Paul, is a regular performer at Monday Night Magic in New York City, and has gained wide acclaim for a highly visual brand of magic combining mind reading, hypnosis, escapes, stunts and more. He’s not the only Valley performer you can catch onstage. Perhaps it’s a monument to the difficulties magicians face in carrying on an ancient art in a world full of ever-changing attempts to grab attention, but it’s hard to find magic performance on the Web, and it’s hard to find it close to home. But it is here if you take the time to look hard enough, and it’s worth the trouble if you find inspiration in that unique moment in which the impossible becomes possible. “
Local magic: Jonas Toutant, Jim Beauregard, Rich Gilbert and P.J. Pinsonnault perform at Alexander’s in Agawam in late June. Toutant performs Thursday nights at the Grapevine Grille in Belchertown and Samuel’s Tavern in Springfield. Pinsonnault performs Saturday nights at Fitzwilly’s in Northampton. Ed Popielarczyk regularly performs at events of all kinds.
