You can practice all you like in front of a mirror—and even in front of your thespian girlfriend—but there’s no substitute for a live audience. In the heat of battle, Murphy’s Law takes over and the unexpected becomes the norm. As I began to roll out my new routine, I became painfully aware of all the ways in which it could go wrong. Mostly it came down to the human element. People shuffled when I told them to cut. They forgot their card. Their handwriting was too messy for me to read the secret name.
“I can’t see,” a spectator told me after she took a card during a gig at a shoebox theater in the Village.
“Oh, are those house lights too bright?” I asked.
“No, I can’t see.”
Finally I realized what she meant. I’d chosen a blind spectator.
When I performed my Tossed-out Deck routine at the geriatrics-only International Battle of Magicians in Canton, Ohio, two of my spectators were so old they couldn’t stand.
Over time, I became acquainted with the subtle art of audience management. I figured out how to avoid, or at least roll with, the inevitable slew of curveballs live performances throw your way. Like a good jazz musician, I learned how to improvise and turn mistakes into opportunities and find my outs when things went sideways. Being able to think on your feet is a critical skill—in magic as in life. “One of the things you learn as a professional,” Wes told me, “is no matter what happens, keep going.”
Penn and Teller liken the process of becoming stage ready to getting a pilot’s license. Before pilots can get their wings, they need to log a certain amount of supervised flight time. There’s no way around this. You simply have to log the hours.
I logged hours every chance I got. I invited people over for a party and made them watch my act. I hijacked other people’s parties and turned their guests into guinea pigs. I did open mike nights. I performed for Arien Mack, my accomplice in the watch-stealing experiment, along with her students, at one of their weekly lab meetings. “That’s truly remarkable,” she said with a dry smile. “All that work, you could have done something useful.” Donning the mantle of the Sage, I turned my newly minted routine into a teaching tool—a sermon on magic, math, and entropy—which I performed for David Bayer’s modern algebra class. Yes, I was breaking the magician’s code yet again by teaching them the secrets behind the tricks. But by now I’d decided that there was just as much beauty and mystery to be found behind the curtain as there was in front of it.
Once you start assembling a routine, it’s amazing how the structure develops, assuming you’ve thought it through to the end. All the pieces fit snugly together like a puzzle, balancing one another out. You discover the internal logic of every action, the pretext for every gesture, the red herrings that allow you to conceal your true purpose.
Kate helped me write out a script for my act. (“Don’t call it patter,” Jeff McBride told us at the Mystery School. “Call it scripts. It automatically elevates it. Patter is for magic tricks. Scripts are for theater.”) She advised me on how to structure my tricks into a coherent narrative. She gave me wardrobe tips and coached me on my delivery and timing.
One of my biggest problems was pacing. I spoke entirely too fast. So I practiced with a metronome to get a feel for the natural rhythms of my act, an idea I got from maestro Juan Tamariz. (Dai Vernon famously said that magic, like speech, needs punctuation.) On pizzeria fixture Jack Diamond’s counsel, I also filmed my routine from different angles, so I could study the sight lines.
When I took piano as a teenager, I’d do run-throughs first thing in the morning. If you can nail an étude with sleep in your eyes, you’re good to go. With this in mind, I practiced my magic routine in my pajamas, minutes after waking up, struggling to pound out eight perfect faro shuffles before my first cup of coffee. Eventually I felt comfortable enough that I could (almost) do it in my sleep.
Then came my big break. Through a well-connected friend, I received an offer to perform at the Gershwin Hotel in the Flatiron district, where I’d be sharing the bill with several famous acts. This was it, I thought, my moment of truth.
On the Saturday before the show, I conferred with Wes. I hadn’t been to Rustico II in a while, because I’d been busy working on my act and spending time with Kate, and I could tell he’d already begun to write me off.
When I arrived at the pizzeria, I found Wes standing outside sucking on a cigarette, even though it was freezing. Shivering in my hoodie, I showed him the special gimmicked sketch pad I’d constructed, which made my second trick possible. I thought it was pretty ingenious, but Wes only shook his head.
“It’ll never work,” he said, ever the Dutch uncle. “The spectator will notice the tension.” He took a long pull off his menthol. “When’s the gig?”
I told him the show was in three days.
“Oh, you’re fucked,” he said, and threw down his smoke.
But for once Wes was wrong. Three days, one pep talk from Kate, and half a Xanax later, I found myself onstage. The house was standing room only, despite the weather—a Nor’easter had dumped a foot of snow on the city that morning—and the show went off without a hitch. When the secret name materialized on the deck after the eighth faro, the volunteer, a tall young woman named Lennon, covered her face. “Oh my God!” she screamed, and the audience went wild. Not only did they seem to like my tricks, they also seemed to like me, maybe because I wasn’t trying to be somebody else. I felt surprisingly relaxed onstage. Okay, the Xanax helped, but it was more than that: I was having fun.
“I think magic is an art very closely related to poetry,” Tamariz says. “The poet manipulates words, and the magician manipulates objects. We are transcending reality in order to produce something poetic, something beautiful, something interior.” For the first time, I felt like I’d found the poetry in my magic.
But I wasn’t prepared to rest on my laurels just yet. My mission wasn’t over. Another challenge awaited me, one I’d been preparing for and dreaming about ever since I’d been red-lighted at the Magic Olympics.
There was one more audience I still needed to face.
DOING MAGIC FOR LAYPEOPLE IS one thing. But performing in front of fellow magicians is something else entirely. As IBM convention chairman Terry Richison put it, “Performing for a roomful of magicians—whew—that takes a lot of guts.”
For me it was the final test, my last labor.
A shot at redemption.
I’d come a long way since the Magic Olympics in Stockholm, both as a performer and as a person. Looking back, I was amazed at how much I’d learned. Not only had I mastered hundreds of moves and dozens of mind-blowing tricks, but I now had an original act I could take with me anywhere. It was a far cry from my Olympic routine, which I’d basically stitched together with shoestring and chewing gum.
At this point, trophies were beside the point. I wasn’t looking to win a prize. I simply wanted to face my fears and prove to myself—and to the judges—that I could hang with the big boys. (And by big boys, I mean high school kids, in several cases.) I also wanted advice on how I might further tighten my act.
So with Kate by my side providing moral support and last-minute performance tips, I flew to San Diego for the IBM Gold Cups, the most prestigious annual close-up competition in the world.
And guess what? I didn’t win.
One magician who did was a high school kid from Acton, Massachusetts, named Shin Lim, a half pint in a white suit with a cunning card to mouth—wherein a signed selection appears folded up inside the magician’s mouth. Fortunately, as a physics student, I was accustomed to being bested by Asian kids several years my junior.
But I more than held my own. The IBM always attracts top-notch talent, and 2010 was an especially strong field. There was LA card star Nathan Gibson, a sleight-of-hand prodigy who had lifted seventeen close-up trophies by the age of eighteen. Swedish magician Johan Stahl—whose radical new sleeving system, called “sleeveless sleeving,” allowed him to vanish objects with his cuffs rolled up—had won the SAM nationals earlier that year and was an odds-on favorite. But he’d have to beat twenty-three-year-old Ben Jackson, a tall Texan who’d taken first place at the 2010 World Magic Seminar in Las Vegas four months earlier. There was even a young man who had juggled swords on America’s Got Talent. “I got to the semifinals,” he told me, exposing a mouth full of metal. “America didn’t vote enough for me.”
Each of the twenty-eight competitors in close-up had to perform his or her—there was one her—act three times, each time in a different room. My first two heats went off without incident, but in the third room something terrifying and unexpected happened.
Just as I was about to begin, a tall white-haired man sauntered in and took a seat in the front row. He looked like a basset hound in a navy blazer. I recognized him immediately. It was frost-faced former IBM president Obie O’Brien, the head judge who’d presided over my elimination at the World Championships in Sweden. He was such a big deal that he even had a prize named after him. Each year, the winner of the people’s choice award receives an OBIE, a wooden plaque worth a free registration to the following year’s convention and a coveted invitation to the FFFF.
Seeing him walk into the room, I felt as if a trapdoor had opened up under my feet. Time seemed to slow down. Red lights began flashing in my head. For a moment, I felt completely paralyzed.
Then I remembered Wes’s sage advice—no matter what happens, keep going—and an odd calm came over me. I started my act. Before long, eight minutes were up and the audience was cheering. Several of the judges had smiles on their faces. It was my best performance yet.
At that moment, I knew it didn’t matter if I won or lost. I no longer cared. I’d done what I’d set out to do. As I struck my set and gathered up my props, I looked over at O’Brien and smiled.
And he even smiled back.
SIPPING A V8 ON THE long northeast slope of the flight back home, thirty thousand feet above the Grand Canyon, I thought of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous observation that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and how this saying also holds true, perhaps especially so, in cases where the technology in question is the human brain.
Every truly great idea, be it in art or science, is a kind of magic trick. A colleague of physicist Richard Feynman once referred to him as a magician of the highest caliber. “Even after we understand what they have done,” he said of geniuses like Feynman, “the process by which they have done it is completely dark.”
But what many of these great thinkers seem to have in common is a love of games and a belief that we do our best work when we’re fooling around. As Isaac Asimov once put it, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ [I’ve found it!], but ‘That’s funny.’ ”
Frank Lloyd Wright conceived Fallingwater while playing with toy blocks. Leonardo da Vinci was obsessed with puzzles and games and tricks. When Feynman found himself in a rut after the Second World War, he realized it was because he’d stopped having fun. “I used to enjoy doing physics,” he recalled in his memoirs. “I used to play with it.” Less than a week later, he was eating at the university cafeteria and he saw someone toss a dinner plate in the air. The peculiar wobble of the plate intrigued him. Shrugging off the skepticism of his peers, he began tooling around with the physics of dishware. Years later, he described this as a major turning point. “There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was,” he wrote. “The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.” Not surprisingly, a similar spirit animated David Bayer and Persi Diaconis when they first began their work on the mathematics of card shuffling. “We started out just playing,” Bayer told me. “We were just amusing ourselves.”
As young children, we learn almost exclusively through play. Why should adulthood be all that different? Once thought of as a static organ, the adult brain turns out to be remarkably plastic. Fresh brain cells sprout from injured tissue. New connections form as our neurons rewire themselves. A recognition of the importance of play, not just during childhood, but well into adulthood, lies at the foundation of the new science of neurobics, or brain fitness, a rapidly growing field that aims to keep a graying population mentally sharp with a daily dose of puzzles and brain teasers. The secret to keeping your mind young, we now know, is to continuously revisit the conditions you experienced as a child, when everything was new and mysterious and you hadn’t yet figured out the rules of the game.
Magic is about re-creating these conditions. It lets us suspend adulthood and retrieve, however fleetingly, that childlike sense of astonishment that was once our resting state but fades as we age.
As fun as it is to fool people, it’s just as fun—more so, even—to be fooled. There’s nothing I enjoy more than seeing a trick and having no clue how it’s done, because it means there’s some new principle at work that I have yet to learn, and behind that, a creative mind at play. This is the feeling of communing with genius—not unlike learning a new concept in physics or listening to a beautiful piece of music.
Being fooled is fun, too, because it’s a controlled way of experiencing a loss of control. Much like a roller coaster or a scary movie, it lets you loosen your grip on reality without actually losing your mind. This is strangely cathartic, and when it’s over, you feel more in control, less afraid. For magicians, watching magic is about chasing this feeling—call it duped delight, the maddening ecstasy of being a layperson again, a novice, if only for a moment.
Just before Vernon died, comedian and amateur magician Dick Cavett asked him if there was anything he wished for. Vernon’s answer, like his magic, was simple.
“I wish somebody could fool me one more time.”