Month: August 2017

Previously: Part One, Desperately seeking escapism

My first foray into entrepreneurship was at age 15 when I began importing magic tricks and other stage props from America to sell, by mail order, in the UK.

At the peak of my garage empire I had maybe a thousand customers, most of whom would send long letters with their cheques (almost always cheques, this being a million years ago), explaining how they planned to use their new props, and sometimes asking my advice on what they should buy next.

My favourite notes, though, came from the non-professional magicians: Those for whom magic was a hobby, not a job. The teacher who used close-up magic in his high school history classes, the doctor who entertained young cancer patients with bedside illusions, the well-known musician who would hide away on his tour bus, practicing false cuts and complicated coin manipulations while his bandmates partied with groupies.

And then there was Mr O’Doyle. Mr O’Doyle (not his real name, but near enough) was an enigma – which, in a customer base made entirely of magicians, was really saying something. Mr O’Doyle didn’t pay by cheque. Rather, he would send large brown envelopes, stuffed with banknotes. Hundreds, or even thousands, of pounds at a time — sent through regular, unregistered, uninsured mail.

Monday. The Orleans Hotel, Las Vegas NV.

It’s a little after 11pm and a white man with a shaved head is reloading his crossbow. Six or seven feet away, a woman dressed in black is holding up a flower, inches from her face. The man takes aim. Several audience members lift their iphones to neck-level, hoping not to be spotted.

About that audience: There are, by my count, at least as many fedoras or other non-baseball hats as there are women. Comfortably three times as many male ponytails as non-white faces.

A couple of guys behind me are talking loudly about a card trick. They know the woman will almost certainly survive. This is, after all, a magicians’ convention — where everyone and everything is always fine in the end.

* * *

I mention all of this – the stark gender and race imbalance, the imperilled leather clad female “assistant” – not to judge, or mock, or even shame, the attendees of this week’s “Magic Live” convention in Vegas. At times like this, it’s important to pick one’s targets carefully, and magicians hardly rank in the top million when it comes to threats to American democracy.

Rather I mention it to explain my own intense discomfort at attending such a dazzlingly white, almost exclusively male event on this of all weeks.