Abracadabra, It’s a Convention! : A Record 1,500 Magicians Compare Tricks, Sleight of Hand

A fair warning is in order: over the next two days, try not to walk into mirrors. Don’t trip over rabbits and, at all costs, avoid a game of three-card monte that may await you on the next street corner.

Fifteen hundred conjurers from the International Brotherhood of Magicians are in town for their largest annual convention ever.

On Thursday, the magic dealers’ exhibition hall at the Horton Plaza Omni looked part trade show, part carnival and entirely unreal. Swords slid harmlessly in and out of body parts, coins appeared and disappeared, cards swirled in an endless kaleidoscope. The confetti explosions of sales demonstrations occasionally punctuated the proceedings.

The 12,500-strong IBM membership includes “everyone from Harry Blackstone and David Copperfield to some of the most inept performers in the world,” said the group’s president-elect, Michael Ellis. Their common bond, according to Ellis, is passion for the art of magic.

Ellis, 71, is a retired theatrical producer from Boca Raton, Fla. “I only got interested in magic when I was 60 years old,” he said, “and it changed my life.”

Enamored of Magic Tricks

Ellis is not alone. Ronald (Rano) Freeman was unemployed and broke a few years ago when he walked into Brad Burt’s magic shop in San Diego. The store’s inventory of magic effects “just blew me away,” Freeman said. “I started saving money from my unemployment checks and buying a trick at a time,” he continued. “And, of course, hiding it from my family and friends.”

Freeman is now a successful full-time performer, but he still gets excited by new tricks. “Check this out,” said Burt, selling him yet another one, “this will blow you away.”

“People pay me to show them toys,” said Burt. “How can you beat that?”

Magicians from the 50 states and 54 foreign countries use the convention to stay abreast of innovations in the industry, Ellis said. Thursday, Stefan Gustav Simek of Vienna was showing Leblie W. H. Au of Honolulu how to flip the velvet drape just so. And one shell artist was trying to relieve another of a dollar. It didn’t work.

The conventioneers are staging paid public performances at the Civic Theater, but an IBM guard at the door of the exhibition room is making sure that trade secrets remain just that. Despite ridicule by performers such as Penn and Teller, who explain their tricks as part of their act, the IBM will continue to cloak trick mechanics in secrecy, Ellis said. Some members feel so strongly about the issue, according to Ellis, that a magician was kicked out of the organization last year for revealing a trick’s secret on the David Letterman show.

“I used to think that way too,” said Ellis, “but now I don’t think it matters. Even if you explain the trick, people still love it.”

But magic is not the exclusive domain of entertainers. Jeff Busby, an Oakland dealer, said he has sold trick equipment to a Haitian voodoo priest. And, together with San Diegan Bart Whaley, Busby has lectured Navy officers on the art of deception.

Whaley, a consultant for the RAND Corp., has authored the 800-page “Encyclopedic Dictionary of Magic, 1584-1988.” A former Central Intelligence Agency specialist in military deception, Whaley said magic is a natural outgrowth of that interest: “It has occurred to me that magicians are light-years ahead of the Pentagon.”

But the object of his life’s work is not deception but truth, Whaley said. “Those who deceive already know how to do it. It is the rest of us who need to know about it.”

The 67-year-old organization has returned to San Diego for the first time since its 1978 convention here. Its local chapter, The Honest Sid Gerhart Ring 76, numbers 120 amateur and professional magicians. The gathering will disappear from town Sunday.