Try to Understand, He’s the Magic Man
September 8th, 2006 by Lola
After watching a contortionist try to fit himself in a 16-inch cube, a mustached nebbish free himself from wrist constraints in 1.47 seconds and a man eat a GE lightbulb, I was roped into an exit interview. I told the interviewer, one of seven magicians convened at Fantasma Magic, “I’ve never seen anything like this before!” Without missing a beat, he exclaimed, “Well, I’ve never seen anything like this before” while pulling out the top of my shirt and taking a gander at the girls. End of interview.
This is the tamest of the shocking things that have happened to or around me since I started 10 months of writing boot camp at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Yesterday’s assignment was a Daybook article, the closest thing journalists come to “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.” My assignment was to cover an event when seven magicians were setting or trying to break 15 world records including fork bending, straitjacket escape, card cutting, balloon animal tying and everything in between. Needless to say, it was an odd way to spend an afternoon.
Let me tell you one thing. Magicians are quite the characters. I don’t know if I’d have brunch with any of them, but I’m sure a drink at Jekyll & Hyde would be vastly improved if I were sharing it with, say, fire eating Scotsman Flambeaux, a former performer at the Cutting Room’s Le Scandale Cabaret. Watching a man eat the flames (for 39.4 seconds, a new world record) is surprisingly sensual… uncomfortably so, in fact. Apparently fire eating involves not only pain control but also repeatedly licking the torch. Ew.
The most uncomfortable part for everyone, I’m sure, was watching 21-year-old contortionist Ravi Seepersad try in vain to stuff his teeny-tiny body in a 16 cubic-inch box. Twice. Nothing is quite so haunting as the screaming of a contortionist. I don’t recommend it. According to Ravi’s wife Candice, the native Trinidadian had been preparing for two months to accomplish the feat. I could see in his face after a second failed struggle that those two months had amounted to very little—just not little enough.
Most of the magicians were local, including the aforementioned glass eater Todd Robbins, who works the Coney Island boardwalk. “I eat about 10 to 12 light bulbs a day,” says the Official Glass Eater of G.E., which he jokingly translates as “Good Eating.” As an expert in sword-swallowing and hammering nails into his nose, he says, “If it weren’t dangerous, no one would care.” The danger comes to life all day Saturday at Coney Island when Robbins mentioned he would be performing.
For those of you who want to see the man who groped me in action, his name is Simon Lovell. As an expert card cutter, he has quite the magic fingers and is displaying them in his Off-Broadway show Strange & Unusual Hobbies. Sounds about right.
September 8th, 2006 at 7:02 pm
Sounds like it was quite exciting. Did you ask Simon Lovell if he has the ability to make himself disappear?
September 8th, 2006 at 8:18 pm
Ew. What a gross, creepy magician. Good luck for surviving the rest of boot camp.
September 9th, 2006 at 5:00 pm
When you say “16 cubic inch box”, I think you mean “a square box that is 16 inches to the side”. 16 cubic inches is a box that’s about 2 inches to the side.. its 0.07 gallons, which is easier to imagine if you know its 1.1 cups approximately (imagine a 2 cup measuring cup half-full
). Honestly I think any man would be extremely offended at the suggestion that any of their body parts would fit into a box 2 inches to the side.
A cube that’s 16 inches to the side is a little bit more liberating - its 4096 cubic inches = 17.7 gallons, and I can kind of see a tiny man fitting into the space of 17 jugs of milk, although I can see how it might be a record, that’s still a tiny tiny box that most small household animals would find stuffy and uncomfortable.