Sorcery is afoot this day at the Gazette office. Dressed in a fancy suit and equipped with a magic wand, the arch-mage Henry Parker has arrived to flaunt the laws of physics with the help of a young audience assembled for this occasion.
"I've got two little red balls," he tells a girl from the audience.
"They're magic and they move very fast."
He has the girl grasp one of the presumably mystic artifacts tightly in one hand.
"Mine is going to join yours, and you're not going to see it or feel it, but we have to say the magic word, OK?" he says.
Abracadabra!
She opens her hand and zounds! Where once was one there are now two!
She gasps. "Did you see that, Mommy!?"
Later, Parker makes balls phase through cups, turns a white cloth yellow, and does several ridiculous routines with rope.
"How did you do that?" asks another girl.
"Very carefully," he replies.
Parker is a former assistant warden with Correctional Service Canada, a professional magician and a lifetime member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians. He's one of the many St. Albert-area residents that have mastered the art of magic.
"I believe there's a lot of good things that come out of magic," he says.
"It's an entertainment activity and a business, but it's also an opportunity to bring some joy and entertainment to individuals."
Practising wizards
Parker is also a member of the Edmonton Magic Club, a secret cabal of sorcerers who meet once a month at the Royal Alberta Museum.
Their outfits tend more toward ball caps and Eskimos jerseys than top hats and cloaks of levitation at this mid-November meeting, but they still manage to hatch dragons from foam bricks, make rings disappear and reappear, and transmute dollars to coins with a flash of flame.
Edmonton lawyer Kent Wong applauds from the end of the table as his fellow magi ply their trade. He's the club's founder, and one of the organizers of its annual Abra-Kid-Abra charity show.
"My parents bought me a magic kit as a birthday present when I was eight years old," he says. There wasn't a whole lot else to do as a kid growing up in Fort McMurray in the '70s, so he started doing tricks from it for his friends.
He was doing birthday parties by age 12 and telethons by 14. By the time he was 17, he'd made enough money to pay his way through university.
"Learning magic really challenged my analytical ability," he says, as he had to learn everything from books. It also helped him to come out of his shell and discover his passion for drama.
Across the table from Wong is St. Albert's Matthew Tracy. Also known as Magic-Matt, he teaches biomedical engineering technology studies at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology and starts the first class of every week with a magic trick.
"If you're late going to class, you miss the trick!" he says.
Like Wong, Tracy says he also got his start as a kid when he got a magic kit as a Christmas present. He loved performing, and was soon begging his mom every Saturday to take him to Willard's House of Magic in Edmonton where he would peruse the latest gadgets and tricks.
Parker says he dabbled in magic as a kid after he saw a magician in a travelling circus in Ponoka, ("I can remember my dad making my first top-hat for me," he recalls), but didn't get back into it until he heard an interview of Wilfred Willard of the aforementioned House of Magic a few decades ago. Willard became his mentor, and he started performing professionally in 1991.
Wong says magic can help you set your business apart from the crowd and entertain your clients – particularly bored kids in your law office.
Practising magic is great for students, as it requires hard work and preparation and disciplines your mind for studies, he continues. It also helps with dexterity: magician David Copperfield teaches patients basic tricks to help with their physiotherapy for this reason.
Tracy says magic helps engage his students and fire his imagination. It's also all about learning a new concept and putting it into practice – kind of what he does as a teacher.
The secrets of magic
Tracy has a tall bookshelf packed with magic at his home. There's a wrist-chopper, a pair of magic bunny-making boxes, hundreds of card decks (regular and trick), foam smiley balls, Chico the magic mind-reading monkey (a puppet) and rows and rows of books and DVDs on magic. He's even got the original magic kit he had as a child.
You can buy a lot of magic tricks from stores and online, Tracy says. Some come with instructional videos. Others cost thousands of dollars.
Many of these tricks have been around for centuries, Parker adds.
"The Chinese linking rings are over a thousand years old," he notes, while the famous cups-and-balls routine dates back at least 3,000.
Tracy demonstrates how a few trick cards (such as a 14 of diamonds) and some clever shuffling techniques can let you perform miracles, such as turning one card into another or turning a deck of red cards into blue ones. Sleeves, palms and concealed devices can all help hide the tricks behind other mystical machinations.
Psychology, particularly misdirection, plays a huge part in magic.
"If I keep my right hand closed and stiff for any period of time, you'd going to be very suspicious of my right hand," Wong says – bad news if you're hiding something in it.
But people naturally assume that a hand can only hold one object at a time, he continues. If you're holding a wand in your right, people won't suspect there's something else in your palm. Likewise, if you maintain eye contact with someone, they're likely to lock eyes with you instead of watching your hands.
"It's not so much that the hand is quicker than the eye as the eye is looking in the wrong place," he says.
But a trick on its own is little more than a puzzle, Wong says.
"The real secrets to magic are above and beyond how the trick is done," he notes, and lay in how a magician uses script, story, staging and theatrics with the trick to invoke emotion in the audience.
Wong has a trick called "The Legend of the Lion" where he has a person appear out of mid-air, for example. Instead of just doing the appearance, he sets it up by dressing in traditional Chinese clothes and speaking about the mythology of the lion dance. As he removes a lion-dance costume head from a large cage, he speaks about how his daughter is the "lion" of his life.
Having drawn in the audience with this story, Wong builds tension with some Chinese drumming before the big finish when he flourishes a cape over the cage, causing his daughter to appear inside it in a blink of an eye.
"Suddenly, you've got very strong, memorable magic," he says.
Don't show the strings
So if the tricks behind magic are so simple, why keep them so secret?
"If you're watching Star Trek you don't want to see the little wires that hold the spaceship up," Wong explains.
While a magician is on stage, you really don't want the audience to think about how a trick is done, he continues – they know it's a trick, so they need to suspend their disbelief to see it as magic.
It's OK if the audience later goes home and looks up the trick on YouTube, Wong says – that's no different from watching the "Making Of" features after the film. But if the crowd thinks that it can figure out even one per cent of your act during your show, "you've destroyed that sense of disbelief."
People don't like being fooled, but they do like mystery and entertainment, Parker says.
"That's what I like to bring to my audience: a little bit of mystery."
