One of the occupational hazards of presenting illusions and telling stories on stage is that I sometimes people believe them. Most of the time, it's a fan after a show who thinks I have something supernatural in common with the psychic they go to, or a co

I. SuperstitionI use to have a lucky pair of swimming goggles. They were neon green, the color of speed, and when I looked through them I felt like I was seeing the world how plants see the world, all blinding greens and yellows. I remember when I would t

A man in a kingdom walked to work every day. And every day he would admire the beauty around him. The flowers in the windows, the perfectly laid cobblestones on the street, and the handsome smiling people around him. On his walk he would look up at the ca

Any conjurer worth her cards knows that the hardest thing to fool an audience into believing is not that something happened, but rather that nothing happened at all. During the course of any illusion, the secret actions that make a trick trick must be eit

When I reminisce about my life, there are a lot of extremely unpleasant experiences that I look back fondly on. Getting stabbed in the hand. Bad relationships. Swim practice. As much as I know that these episodes were filled with sleep deprivation, light-

I. MadnessMany years before you or I were born, during the late Middle Ages and throughout the Renaissance in Europe, people danced. Sometimes it was a sole soul doing the boogie-woogie, sometimes it was thousands upon thousands all writhing and convulsin

I'd like to tell you a story about unintended consequences and a man by the name of Kenneth Adelman. Back in halcyon days of 2003, when Smash Mouth was huge and I was learning how to do magic tricks off VHS tapes, Kenneth was gainfully employed by the Cal

In the history of mentalism, there is perhaps no greater act that has imprinted itself onto the soul of its performers than the oracle act. In the act, the oracle on stage answers thought-of questions from the audience about their futures. One moment a ma

One of the lesser known laws of the universe says that if you encounter a magician with a deck of cards, within five minutes he or she will tell you this statistic: "Did you know that there are more possible combinations of this deck of cards than there a

Once upon a time, there were two fighters in an arena, one small, one large. The smaller one asked the bigger one: Why are you always beating me? The bigger one replied: My size and strength are without peer. If you wish to truly know how great I am, all