Working His Magic on Patients

None of Ted Wakai’s students had planned on studying magic.

Of course, they also hadn’t planned on car accidents, strokes, spinal problems and brain injuries.

But those were the misfortunes that struck them, and Wakai, a lean, wisecracking 78-year-old retired chemical engineer known professionally as “The Wizard of Oxnard,” was the remedy at hand.

Wakai is part of a movement popularized by magician David Copperfield. Besides performing such high-profile feats of legerdemain as making the Statue of Liberty “disappear,” Copperfield started Project Magic, which sends magicians into hospitals not just to entertain but to help patients recover. Several other groups around the U.S. do the same.

Patients in the rehabilitation unit at St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard learn simple magic tricks from Wakai once a month. The quicker-than-the-eye discipline is said to be therapy for shaky hands and shaken spirits, and has been applied in more than 1,000 hospitals around the world over the last two decades.

At St. John’s, half a dozen patients watched intently from their wheelchairs recently as Wakai pulled a little razzle-dazzle from his aluminum briefcase -- a batch of $1-million bills emblazoned with his smiling mug.

“You can cash them in at an offshore bank,” he said. “The west bank of Anacapa Island!”

There was some polite laughter -- the best available at the moment from people in various forms of anguish.

Hooked up to a clear plastic bag dripping nutrient into her veins, Maria Mojica was squirming from the pain of back surgery. Nancy Jones was dealing with pins inserted in her shattered leg after a car crash. Sitting with a box of Kleenex in her lap, Dortha Moore was trying to put her life back together after her fourth stroke.

Working the room like a Catskills comic, Wakai shook hands with Oskar Mages, who had emerged from a 10-day coma barely a week before.

“What are you doing here?” Wakai asked. “You’ve got one strong grip!”

Despite their infirmities, the patients followed raptly as Wakai led them through the ins and outs of “Kliptomania” -- a trick that involved folding their $1-million bills just so and affixing two paper clips in the folds. Following Wakai’s directions, his charges grasped each end of their bills, gave a tug and -- voila! The two clips, now mysteriously linked to each other, shot off like champagne corks on New Year’s Eve.

“Did it!” cried Jones.

“You’re a good gal,” Wakai said. “You’ll make a terrific magician.”

That would be a bonus. The real point is to help patients rebuild the skills they once took for granted and bolster the self-esteem that illness has knocked for a loop.

“This helps them concentrate on something enjoyable,” said Jennifer Thompson, a recreational therapist who helped organize the St. John’s program. “They’re focusing on the tricks, but at the same time they’re maintaining and enhancing their fine motor skills and coordination.”

In fact, the Project Magic manual lists a slew of lofty-sounding therapeutic goals for the linking-clips trick, including “cognitive planning, increased range of motion and improved sensory-motor skills.”

Thompson circulated through the room, helping patients who were struggling and cheering on the friends and spouses who came along for the lesson. At times, she has to improvise; when a patient can’t use one of his hands to grasp the end of a string, she might let him know it’s OK to use his teeth.

In rapid order, Wakai showed his crew how to do half a dozen tricks: the floating pencil, the jumping rubber bands, the multicolored elastic hoops that magically swap places on one’s fingertips.

A couple of patients whooped when they got it. One frustrated man simply sat and stared at his lap. Another, exhausted, signaled for a nurse to wheel him back to his room.

Most of the patients would check out of the hospital before Wakai’s next monthly visit. But therapists would help those who wanted to practice the tricks for the rest of their stays.

“I’m counting on you,” Wakai told them. “I’m getting old and losing my marbles, so I’ll need you to carry on.”

Wakai, who studied magic as a kid in Honolulu in the mid-1930s, is now a fixture on the birthday-party circuit. He also teaches Japanese and chemistry part time and plays the ukulele at weekly jam sessions. Until his bum knee acted up recently, he tap-danced.

Last fall, he was at St. John’s as a patient, with four broken ribs and a punctured lung from a car crash. The night after he checked out, he went swing dancing.

A few weeks later, he attended a Project Magic convention in Las Vegas, where more than 100 sleight-of-hand artists learned the fine points of transforming illusion into therapy.

Whether simple magic tricks work better or as well as more routine therapy is an open question from a scientific point of view, said Julie De Jean, the national administrator of Project Magic.

“We’ve never been able to get a study in place that can effectively measure it,” she said, adding that the method’s success can depend on intangibles like a patient’s willingness to dabble in what might seem weird or juvenile.

Even so, De Jean, the administrator of the Stormont-Vail West mental health facility in Topeka, Kan., pointed to benefits that can’t be quantified.

Spinal injury patients who can’t move their hands get an emotional boost from mastering guess-the-card tricks, she said. Runaway children and psychiatric patients get a desperately needed shot of self-esteem when they can succeed in front of others with even a simple rope trick.

De Jean recounted the story of a man who lavished hundred-dollar bills on Copperfield at a Project Magic fund-raiser in Los Angeles.

She said the man had taught a few basic tricks to his father, who used them to lift himself from a severe depression that settled in after a stroke.

“You gave me back my dad,” he told Copperfield.

As for Wakai, he has a more personal reason for hauling his bag of tricks to St. John’s.

“I love to see the patients’ faces brighten,” he said. “It’s my therapy.”