Our first Mushroom Soup Day of 2015. Mark, having blogged aplenty the last week, is scaling back to a more human pace today.
I spent the first day of the year writing pages for a book that no one is paying me to write or even knows about…just something I'm doing for myself to decide whether it's really a whole book worthy of offering to publishers.
I spent most of the second day up at the Magic Castle. The Castle opened its doors on January 2, 1963 so you can do the math and figure out which anniversary it was. They opened yesterday to members only and had a big party and there was a kind of "State of the Castle" presentation about how it's doing and what it will be doing so I got to see a lot of friends and magicians and magician-friends.
There was a special performance by Tom Mullica, who was long hailed as the master of "cigarette magic." Here's a video I posted once here of Tom doing the act that earned him that distinction. It's an act he no longer performs for health reasons and also because many performing venues frown on (or are legally prevented from) allowing smoking, especially the way he did it.
Tom now performs a tribute act in which he transforms himself into his old friend, Red Skelton. But last night at the Castle, he returned to his magical roots and favored us with a new, smokeless magic act and many folks in the trickery industry were there to see this very clever man.
I will be back with you soon.