Magic Tricks

Sunday, March 30, 2008

When I was a boy, my dad intrigued us with magic tricks. He could make coins change denominations; cards and rabbits appear out of no-where. As a teenager he was really big into magic and traveled all through southern Idaho putting on shows for the high schools. His favorite trick was to switch places with his assistant after the assistant had been handcuffed, tied up, placed in a bag, locked into a crate which was then chained together, all under constant view of the audience (except for 3 seconds) when he would shut the curtain, and instantly the assistant would open the curtain and show that now my dad was in the crate, in the bag, tied up and handcuffed. As I grew older, he showed me and my brothers how the tricks were done. What, as a child had seemed to be pure magic, was merely, getting someone to ‘suspend their disbelief’ so they would believe the illusion, and then he would misdirect their attention long enough to get them to not notice what was ‘really’ happening. Smoke and mirrors if you will. If you could get someone to look one direction while you did something in the other direction, you could do almost anything you wanted …and they wouldn’t catch it because they wanted to believe.