Brian Dreger wrote to ask…
Being that you've been around magicians a lot, I'm wondering if you ever met Kreskin a.k.a. The Amazing Kreskin. But if you haven't met him, what did you think of him as a performer? I really liked the guy, although I sometimes thought he over-explained the set up to a trick.
You can like many aspects of what a magician does beyond the ingenuity of his or her tricks. One of my favorite magicians was a gent named Don Alan whose magic was not that amazing but whose ability to be funny throughout the entire presentation was unmatched. You can like a magician's style or his/her showmanship (Is there a gender-neutral synonym for "showmanship?") You can like the manual/physical dexterity. There are all sorts of things.
No, I never met Kreskin. Never saw him in person either, though once I was in Laughlin, Nevada for a few days and he was playing at the hotel right across the street. I saw an ad — I think tickets to his show were $9.95 or even lower — and there was a number to call for reservations. I thought, "Reservations? If Kreskin's any good, he oughta just know I'm coming and save a seat for me!"
But I never got over there. I'd have liked to see him because I liked his style and patter, especially when he was guesting on someone else's show and had time restraints put on him. He had his own show for a while and I recall that he would take a solid three-minute trick and stretch it out to what felt like ten.
But! In the last decade or two I developed an aversion to magicians who pass perfectly simple magic tricks off as genuine psychic power or telepathy. I'm one of those people who believes — no, knows that there ain't no such thing as genuine psychic power. I could tolerate and even appreciate it with someone like my pal, the late Max Maven. Max did it with style and in a manner that…well, you'd have to be really, really dimwitted to think it was anything but a trick.
But I have seen magicians who felt that a vital part of their act was convincing the audience that their "psychic powers" were bona fide. I have to wonder how many of them acted as a kind of gateway drug for the kind of people who fall prey to the Sylvia Brownes of the world. I'm talking about connivers who feign such powers to bilk the bilkable.
At the Magic Castle, I have occasionally seen audience members who forgot that the building they were in had the word "Magic" in its name. They didn't think that a magician actually sawed the lady in half but they seemed to think that the only conceivable way a different magician could have known the spectator picked the three of diamonds was if he had genuine supernatural powers.
In fact, at the Castle, you will often see a magician have an audience member pick a card, show it to everyone except the magician, then return it to the deck. The deck is then shuffled yet somehow the magician locates and identifies the card. That happens all the time and if it's in the context of doing card tricks, no one thinks the magician has done something unearthly…unless he or she claims psychic powers. If he or she acts like he or she does, someone in the audience may come away thinking that is so.
I have highly-mixed feelings about feeding that kind of gullibility. So I have slightly-mixed feelings about Kreskin, especially now that he's marketing a pendulum that you get when you sign up for one of his Zoom lectures. What's the deal with this pendulum? Here's part of the sales spiel reachable through his website…
Have questions, quandaries, or issues you can't quite figure out? In less than 5 minutes, Kreskin's Pendulum technique can help you tap into your unconscious mind and provide a second opinion.
I think that's crossing the line, working the same side of the street as those folks who charge you loads o' cash to think you're communicating with your dead relatives.
So I liked Kreskin the Magician but I'm not fond of Kreskin the Psychic. That's a long answer to a short question. If you knew I was going to do that, it doesn't mean you have psychic abilities.
