I watched my first magic show last week. It was only in hindsight that I realized I had never seen a magic show before, and immediately felt like I missed out on my childhood 🙁
David Gerard calls himself a magician and a mindreader, and I would add improv comedian to that list as well. He opened with this claim: “There are three types of people who come to my show. Type 1 are the skeptics who spend the entire time trying to figure out the trick. Type 2 are the ones who want to remember and relive the magic they experienced in their childhood.” And apparently type 3 was completely unmemorable for me.
The show was, for lack of a better word, magical. There were no doves flapping their wings or voluptuous girls cut into pieces, just lots of audience interaction with funny talk in between. He let some people pick envelopes out of his hand that had bills with their exact physical descriptions. Somehow he was able to replicate an impromptu drawing someone drew without looking. My friend flipped through a book and picked a random word to memorize, and he was able to guess it after knowing the first letter. He drank a glass of needles and pulled them out of his mouth on a string.
There were lots of hanging “WTFs” in the air.
After the show, our group of friends spent quite some time trying to figure out all the tricks. We succeeded on some, but others had us (or at least me) losing sleep over. Can you guess which type of people we were? 😛
And then I stopped. Not because I’m no longer curious, but as an adult, it’s been a while since I experienced that sense of wonder. Most things fit neatly into the logical paradigm I’ve become accustom to, and it’s not that easy to find something that both defies understanding and is just plain fun (I mean, I kind of want to put this whole Donald Trump thing into this category but the minute possibility that he even has a chance to become our president makes me slightly sad and scared).
Sometimes you just gotta embrace the magic.
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