The Story of My Magic

Time to take a step away from street performing this week and just talk about magic. I was a magician long before I started street performing, after all. Still, even though my experience with being a busker is still in its early stages, my love of magic has always been intricately tied in with my love of performance.

Here’s the story I tell anyone who asks:

When I was really really little, my big brother showed me a trick where he pulled his thumb off his hand. I was in awe. Then he taught me how to do it, and I was hooked. At the tender age of five (or six, or seven, cuz my memory of life events sucks), I started asking for magic kits and magic tricks for Christmas  and birthdays. In high school, after I did a research project on Houdini, I started pursuing magic more seriously. By the time college came around, I was performing at dormitory events and holding annual shows for my school.

If I delve into that story a little bit more deeply, I realize that magic for me has never just been about the magic tricks:

There was a time in middle school when I stopped learning new magic tricks. I had an arsenal of effects pulled together from various magic kits for kids buried away in the back of my mind; I had used them in magic shows for the family at holidays.

And then I had grown up.

I still had a couple tricks up my sleeve (ba duh dumm! okay, bad pun). 

See? Literally. A deck of cards up my sleeve... on my sleeve?
Actually, I have no idea how I did this.
(photo by Kimberly Maize)

I have been palming coins and making them vanish (just that one move) for as long as I can remember. First, with fake plastic quarters and then with real ones. I knew the most basic of self-working card trick principles. And then I had maybe five tricks that I had learned from The World’s Greatest Magic, a television show from the 90’s that I watched religiously. I did maybe three of those tricks over and over again for different audiences, if the time for it came up. But that was it.

Freshman year of high school, my English teacher gave us a weekly assignment called “Vocab Visuals.” Each week, my classmates and I were given a word from our weekly vocabulary list, and we had to find some way to present that word in a visually impactful way.

This was the trigger that pulled me back into my childhood hobby.

Every week, I dug up an old trick that I knew. I took the trick and – thanks to the nature of the assignment – was forced to create a new story, a new presentation that aligned with the vocabulary word I was presenting that week. A simple four aces production became a story about four brothers finding each other again after two were arrested. I don’t remember all the vocabulary words now, and I certainly don’t remember all the stories I had told each week, but I do know this: every single trick that I had presented back then came from magic kits designed for children. Somehow, with the scarcest of magical resources, I had managed to tell stories.

There was a moment in high school when I jumped on a magical bandwagon, when I left the realm of magic tricks for kids and started learning the trendiest tricks of the time. I’ll be honest: it was a great time. This was when I learned pretty much everything that I now know about magic – the sleights, the history, and the possibilities. If you see me perform today (on the fly and not in a show), you’ll probably see me perform something that I learned from this era… from, I guess, what would have been my magical adolescence.

Come to think of it, that mus have been around the time when I got my straight jacket.
Cuz, you know. I probably needed.
(photo by KimbaWayne Photography)

I can’t deny that the routines I learned from that era generate the loudest reactions, the most shock. But what I find most challenging these days – what I enjoy most – is those moments when I take a trick and tell my own story with it. When I was Joan of Arc for a presentation in a college Shakespeare course, I took some effects that I knew – some things that I barely ever use – and blended them into the play. It happened again more recently, but less intentionally, when I took my show out to the street… as, show by show, I polished and changed my street routine as the day went on, as I learned what worked and what didn’t.

Stories can be over-the-top and cheesy sometimes.

I am READING YOUR MIND! ...yeah.
(photo by Friends of the Library at Amherst College)

That’s the danger of overthinking them. But when done well, stories are really the reason behind my love for magic. Magic may be my main tool, the main way through which I tell my stories (at least live – writing is another major tool), but, in the end, it’s just a tool. Other than a few things here and there, I haven’t really learnt any new magic tricks or sleights since college.

That was four years ago.

Sure, part of that has to do with being a grown-up (grown-upish…) and needing to know what I can and cannot spend on. But part of it has to do with my more recent experiences with street performing, when I returned to my roots as a storyteller.

Writing this post has also returned me to my early days performing magic for my high school English class, when I was able to take a few plastic briefcases filled with magic tricks for kids, and modify them for every vocabulary word my English teacher threw at me. I often pointed to this moment as the time when I started being a magician again. But as cousin after cousin (I have a pretty large family) go through this class, and as each of these cousins tell me that my former English teacher still tells the story of a shy little Asian girl performing a different magic trick with the vocabulary words she came upon each week, I have finally started to realize something: it wasn’t those little tricks performed with those plastic dingy props that stayed in her memory.

It was the stories that they told.

If I could do all that with so few props, what can I do now, knowing what I now know? Magic is sometimes called the art of astonishment, and good magic definitely is that. But magic as an art form for storytelling can be so much more: it can be funny, it can be touching, it can be romantic, sad, and scary. The effect of magic in a story is only limited by the story that you tell. That’s why a magician I know sometimes takes up a southern accent for his show, as he plays a role that adds to the story he performs. That’s why one of my favorite magicians spends his entire show talking about (and finding in random places) Fig Newtons.

And why I like dramatic photos of random objects.
(photo by Ashley Rivera)

So maybe realizing this is the next step in my growth as a magician and performer (something I haven’t done in a long time – grow. I long for the day when I will be 5’5” instead of 5’4”). Being a storyteller isn’t distinct from being magician; in fact, it is the very thing that drives my magic.