Many a Friday afternoon, you'll find me lunching at the Magic Castle in Hollywood. I've been a member of the Academy of Magical Arts, which operates the Castle as its clubhouse, since 1980. It's mainly an evening place but on Fridays, there's a splendid lunch buffet for members and their guests. Mine yesterday were my friends, Shelly Goldstein and John Plunkett. We dined and then hurried down to the Close-Up Gallery to see a performance by Ryan Hayashi.
Who's Ryan Hayashi? If you ask that, you obviously haven't been watching Penn & Teller: Fool Us, the show were magicians attempt to baffle the tall loud one and the not-as-short-as-people-think-he-is quiet one. If you'd been watching last July, you would have seen Ryan's appearance. Here it is in full in case you didn't see it or want to see it again…
The trick Ryan did is called the Coin Matrix. It's an old, commonly-performed trick and I even did it — about one ten-thousandth as well as he did — back when I was a teen dabbling in magic. He's been at the Castle doing three shows a night every night all week and magicians are lining up to see him. Put simply: This man does this trick better than anyone else and he has added new twists and new angles and it really is a matter of someone managing to improve on a classic.
We saw him perform it live. I was maybe ten feet from him. Shelly, who got selected as an involuntary volunteer, was seated at the table about twenty inches from where the coins appeared and disappeared. We were both astonished, as was John standing near me. (It was Standing Room Only in there because so many people wanted to see him.) As impressive as it is in the above video, it was even more stunning in person.
He also did some card tricks and some very funny patter, and I got to have a nice conversation with him after his performance. What a great guy — and trust me that the sentiments and emotions he displays in the video are absolutely genuine. I have been fortunate to see some of the greatest magicians of the last 38 years at the Castle. I have never seen anyone better than Ryan Hayashi.