Presto! Students Learn the Tricks of the Trade : Magic: How do they do it? Huntington Beach’s Steve Klasky conjures up a few secrets of levitation and sawing people in half.
More than 15 years ago, Jill Deweese laid down on a board, closed her eyes and floated in the air--at least, that’s what magicians Penn and Teller told her, after recruiting Deweese from the audience to serve as the volunteer in their levitation trick.
Ever since that magical day at Penn and Teller’s Lido Isle show, Deweese, now 41, has wondered: “How did they do it?”
On Monday night, after all these years, she found out.
The revelation came at Irvine Valley College, where Deweese was one of three women and 22 men to enroll in Magic 101--or, more precisely, Community Education Event 1568, “Secrets of the Professional Magician.”
The course, taught by Huntington Beach magician Steve Klasky, promised students not only the skills to perform “magic for fun (and profit),” but also “secrets known by professional conjurers since the dawn of time.”
Klasky, 45, began by revealing the secret of magic.
“Is there anyone here who believes in real magic?” he asked the class. Lips pursed and eyes darted, but no one raised a hand.
“Good,” said Klasky. “We magicians have a name for those people: suckers.”
Indeed, Klasky then began his lecture by discussing the ways shamans, witch doctors and, in recent times, certain evangelists, have used their skills to wield power over a credulous public.
The ancient Greek temples, he said, employed a certain deus ex machina --altars mechanically designed to burst into flames upon the reading of an incantation, for example--to impress worshipers with their Olympian connections.
In the Philippines today, Klasky said, healers use simple sleights-of-hand to fool believers into thinking they have removed tumors from their bodies. And in this country, Klasky noted, the Amazing Randi, celebrated debunker of mystics, proved that televangelist Peter Popov’s divine gift for mind-reading was aided by a tiny radio transmitter.
“Only in the last couple of centuries has magic been generally thought of as mere entertainment,” Klasky said.
But the class--whose members included several engineers, a neurologist, three construction workers, a pastry chef, a real estate agent and a mortician--hadn’t come for a history lesson. They wanted to saw women in half. Or at least to learn how it’s done. Klasky obliged.
Drawing charts on the chalkboard, Klasky showed the designs of several cabinets employed for the saw-the-woman-in-half trick, including older models that used two people (one in each half of the box, so that legs could wiggle when the cabinet was divided) and high-tech newer versions that use motorized fake feet to give the impression that a living person continues to live after being cut in two.
Klasky went on to explain how magician David Copperfield had caused a jetliner to disappear (hidden projectors being the theory), and made the revelation that illusionists sometimes employ shills--audience members planted to be accomplices in their tricks.
Through it all, however, several students continued to insist that what they had seen--what had, in fact, motivated them to take the $40, two-part, four-hour course--couldn’t have been so simple.
“But I saw it myself!” insisted one student. “He put the cigarette right through the middle of the quarter!”
Klasky, a bearded, bespectacled performer who prefers casual clothes to a top hat and cape, frowned. “Sure he did.” Klasky then talked about trick quarters, which he said are expertly machined to have a virtually undetectable hinged flap in the center.
It was in the laboratory portion of the course, however, that students began to learn how effective simple techniques of trickery can be.
Given a small wooden paddle, each student learned to make a dot on one side of the device disappear by simply moving one hand across it. With a length of soft cotton rope, they learned to make a tightly wound knot disappear just by grabbing it.
And for their last trick, the students mastered the “professor’s nightmare.” This involved taking three seemingly identical lengths of rope, and turning them into three of different lengths--and then changing them back. Klasky told them to bring a deck of cards, and a 50-cent piece, to next week’s session.
After class, the students revealed different motives for studying prestidigitation.
“Once, I saw this guy pour a glass of wine into his hand, and then pour it back in the glass,” said a German-accented Gunter Rehm, 50, the pastry chef from Mission Viejo. “I want to learn this.”
For others, there were more complex issues at hand.
“Magic is a fun way to explore the fact that things in the world aren’t always quite what they seem,” said Mike Cummings, 40, the Laguna Niguel neurologist who was taking the course with his wife, Jeannette.
“You can apply these principles to politics, or religion or advertising,” he said.
“My approach is a lot simpler,” said Chung Wong, 50, a Space Shuttle engineer from Lake Forest. “I like to perform these tricks before children. They believe anything, so it’s instant success for me.”
But some left the class with questions unanswered. Klasky had explained different methods of levitation, some involving stage hands dressed in black, others employing cantilevered rods that allow magicians to trace rings around floating bodies. Jill Deweese thought that made sense, but she still wondered about that day with Penn and Teller.
“My head was kind of hanging down off the board, and they pretended they hypnotized me, although I wasn’t sure at the time if they had really hypnotized me because it seemed like I was levitating,” Deweese said.
“There had to be a trick to it. Because you can’t levitate someone. Can you?”