My Mother Was Really Loving

I Could Vanish The Silk Better Than Ben Vereen - That Was For Sure. So I Think Maybe They Said, "okay, Maybe He Has Something To Offer." Years Pass And I Get A Bit Of A Career, And Ben Vereen Ends Up Hosting One Of My Specials Where I Walked Through The Great Wall Of China. Things Came Full Circle In Kind Of An Ironic Way, When You Have That Honor Of People That Have Influenced You So Much Host Your Show. It's A Huge Experience In Your Life.

Magic And New Technology Have Always Walked Hand In Hand - Even Back In The Days Of Robert Houdin.

There Was A Guy Named Ed Mishell. He Was This Grandfatherly Guy Who Did All The Illustrations For The Catalogs And Reviewed Magic Effects For The Magic Magazines, So All Of The Magic Dealers Would Send Him Magic Effects For Free-it Was A Great Deal. His Basement Was Full Of This Stuff. He Took Me Under His Wing, And He Would Sneak Me Into The Society Of American Magicians Meetings In New York. It's The World's Oldest Magic Organization.

I Was A Captive And A Slave. I Loved Dora Spenlow To Distraction! She Was More Than Human To Me. She Was A Fairy, A Sylph, I Dont Know What She Was--anything That No One Ever Saw, And Everything That Everybody Ever Wanted.

I Wrote An Op-ed Piece In The New York Times About The Amazing Effect Of Shared Wonder - How I Have An Audience Filled With People Who You'd Think Would Hate Each Other, People From Every Religious Category, All At The Same Show At The Same Time. And It's An Amazing Phenomenon To Watch This Shared Sense Of Wonder, Where These People Who Really Don't Like Each Other - For Good And Bad Reasons, Reasons That Make Sense And That Don't Make Sense - Are In The Same Room, Experiencing This Unification.