I spent a lovely evening up at the Magic Castle last night, along with my friends Paul Dini and Misty Lee. For those of you who don't know, the Magic Castle is a private club located in Hollywood. To become an Associate Member, you have to pay the initiation fee. To become a Full Member, you have to pay the initiation fee and have the membership committee certify you as a magician of some accomplishment. I am a Full Member, though my magic is a lot like my drawing: I can do it but I usually don't, deferring to others around me who are more skilled.
I used to draw a lot but then I started hanging around with people like Jack Kirby and Sergio Aragonés and Dan Spiegle and Alex Toth and…well, would you try to sing with Pavarotti in the room? Maybe you would but I wouldn't.
When I was a young lad, I would sometimes bore/amuse my relatives with lame magic tricks. This was when I wasn't boring/amusing them with my lame ventriloquist act. I had a card trick that called for me to force a card on a spectator…the King of Diamonds. Via a means I hoped wouldn't be obvious, I would get someone to select the King of Diamonds, all the time thinking they'd picked at random. Then I would vanish it.
Then I had an envelope that was sitting in plain sight during all of this. It had a King of Diamonds sealed inside — not the same one, of course, but all King of Diamondses look alike. So having vanished the selected King of Diamonds, I would then open the sealed envelope and there would be the chosen card, having miraculously disappeared from my grasp and reappeared inside the sealed envelope. Amazing. Anyway, that was how the trick was supposed to work. As it turned out, it worked even better than that.
I set up to perform my trick for a small group of relatives and their friends. I think I was about nine or ten. I placed the sealed envelope in view and then with the snottiness of every magician I had ever seen on TV, I announced I was going to ask someone to pick a card. Thinking he was being funny, my Uncle Aaron blurted out, "King of Diamonds!"
I couldn't believe the dumb luck but I kept my composure. I said, "Fine" and I skipped the card force and the vanish and instead handed the envelope to Uncle Aaron and asked him to open it. When he found the King of Diamonds inside, jaws fell open. Mark was the greatest magician of all time.
It was a powerful, prideful moment…a roomful of grown-ups utterly stumped as to how a child had done that thing he did. For months after it, some of them asked me to tell them how it was done because they couldn't imagine any way it was possible. I didn't tell them it wasn't possible. My parents kept asking me to perform the trick for other friends and relatives. I declined, explaining that a good magician never repeats a trick in front of the same people. At one point, my father wanted some friends of his who were visiting to see how brilliant his son was. He said, "If I leave the room, will you do it for them?" I don't recall the reason I came up with for declining but I didn't tell him I couldn't do it again.
I suppose in some lives, that would have been the key moment that encouraged the kid to grow up and become David Copperfield. With me, it had the opposite effect. I couldn't do another magic trick for my relatives and their friends because I didn't have anything else comparable. I pretty much decided to quit while I was ahead.
A few years later, my friend Randy Jacobs and I had a little "company" that ran birthday parties for younger kids. We'd organize games and activities, making some decent money for taking that burden off the birthday boy's parents. I did most of the entertaining. I had a puppet show. I drew cartoon characters. And I did a little magic act I worked up that include the card in the envelope trick as it was supposed to be performed. It worked well but some kid would usually yell out, "That's not the same King of Diamonds" and I'd want to say to them, "You're right…but you should see this trick when my Uncle Aaron is around." I now confine my magic performances to small groups when there are no kids present…and no magicians better than me. Which is most of them.
Anyway, great magicians last night…especially Jonathan Pendragon, who is now doing a solo act. We also enjoyed a fine juggler named Lindsay Benner, the brilliant marionettes of Scott Land and the incredible ventriloquism of my old pal, Ronn Lucas. [Warning: Ronn's webpage talks to you the minute you go there. Everything about Ronn talks to you.] I've been a member of the Magic Castle for more than half my life…since back when the food wasn't very good but you overlooked it because the rest of the evening was so sensational. Now they've upgraded the food to the point where you'd go there just for it…and the rest of the evening is better than ever. It sure was last night.