Red Room Where the Writers Are

Tao Restaurant

42-44 E. 58th Street

New York NY  10022

While most would start a description of a space with an entrance way or an outdoor façade, my memories are always first drawn to the area above, and so I will begin by explaining that Tao has 33-foot ceilings—my favorite proportions for a medium-sized room. Technically, for an aerialist, if using the average 30-foot length of tissue, a six-foot cable “stinger” can easily be added to cover the difference, while still allowing for a couple feet of fabric on the floor. The wooden beams of Tao have no clearance over the top. As the building was made over a hundred years ago, rigging from one bolt with an eyehook would be a very bad idea. Mike Sapsis of Sapsis rigging solved the problem for the restaurant with special 4-hole metal brackets made in his workshop. One on either side of the beam with bolts connecting for support and an eye at the bottom made for a sturdy point to hang from. But I am getting ahead of myself.

            My first evening at Tao was truly magical. It was almost a year to date before I performed there. I was the guest of Bill Kalush, the author of The Secret Life of Houdini, and his friend David Blaine. Bill wanted to talk about ideas for a new Vaudeville show of which I might be a small component—he had recently seen me perform at an after-party for Saltimbanco. David wanted Bill’s company on one of their regular outings on the town. Both men had quite a reputation for loving the company of beautiful women and Tao was a good place to find them, as they often flocked around the bar like deer at a watering hole, ripe for the hunt. Or perhaps it was the other way around: the bankers and celebrities would eat at tables while the desperate beauties descended like vultures between courses….

            At any rate, I found eating on the balcony at Tao to be quite an experience. The ginger salmon I had ordered wasn’t as exciting as looking out over the immense room with the sixteen-foot Buddha staring back at me. I had an excellent view of her suggestively exposed wooden beams and couldn’t help but gaze longingly at the ceiling. Who would have guessed we were eating our meals in an elegant parking garage—although anything built by Cornelius Vanderbilt II is bound to be luxurious. If it was good enough to stable his horses it must be good enough for the rest of New York because in 2007 Tao NY made over $27 million and was the third ranked independent restaurant in NYC. (Tavern on the Green being the first).”

            Yes—Tao used to be the stable for the famous One West Fifty-Seventh Street mansion built by Cornelius II a couple of years after inheriting a large part of his grandfather’s estate in 1877. His home (on the site where Bergdorf Goodman now stands) has since been demolished—the only remnant being this stable located around the corner from the original entrance.

            As an amateur historian, I found the Vanderbilt family to be a challenge. For one thing, they all share the same first names. Just tracing the male lineages over four generations—there were five men named Cornelius, four William Henrys and three William Kissams—was a chore. I can’t help but wonder if they did this purposely to confuse future journalists, as if their descendents were carefully laid out in circles around the Commodore-like the streets of Washington D.C. around the U.S. Capitol, to perplex and ward off potential attacks.

            The Vanderbilts are an old Dutch family that came to America in the seventeenth century and moved to Staten Island in 1715. Cornelius I (the Commodore) made his family’s huge fortune through steamboat transportation at the time when the Erie Canal was being built and New York was becoming the number one port in a rapidly growing America. Quick to cash in on opportunities, he was also the first create a South American steamboat route (with a short jaunt over land in Nicaragua) during the gold rush. His son, William Henry, got him interested in the railroad business, and the Commodore bought the controlling share of the New York Central and other lines as he tried to gain a monopoly of all trains leading in and out of the city. He further increased his profits by becoming a master at stock manipulation of his railroad holdings.

            The Commodore left an estate of over 90 million to be spent by his family. Three family members filed plans on the same day to erect the most elaborate houses then to be seen in New York along Fifth Avenue commencing what would soon be known as “Vanderbilt Row.”

            Cornelius II hired the architect George B. Post to design his home (and stable). At the time Post was better known for his office buildings but my guess is that Cornelius’s brother William K. via his pushy wife Alva, had already engaged the more popular architect, Richard Morris Hunt, for his home at 660 Fifth Avenue. The second most obvious choice would be his former student, Post. Work was commenced in 1879 and the home was ready for the family in 1882.

            What we now know as Tao, Cornelius’s stable, was made of brick and limestone with a peaked roof; it was originally French Renaissance in style.

            Servants lived on the second floor.

            Sasha Baron Cohen happened to be sitting at a table across the balcony from us, dining with a writer from the Simpsons. He came over to our table to say hello to David and I was lucky enough to see a few card tricks performed for his benefit.

            Magic is a funny thing. It demands audience participation, but at the same time it dominates a group and immediately puts an end to all communication. Although David’s card magic was spellbinding, I couldn’t help being a little disappointed that while it was happening the conversation halted (Not that I personally had anything remarkable to say to SBC but I was hoping I might hear something to make me smile a little bit...) Instead the dialogue went something like this:

 

David:             Hey, check this out. (Whips out deck of cards, table became completely silent, DB’s hands mystified us all)

SBC:                Wow. Unbelievable!

David:             Like that one? Here’s another! (Again hands moving, mouths silent, eyes agog)

SBC:                That’s amazing!!!

David:             This is another cool one. (Repeat performance with mad complements in the end)

SBC:                Incredible! Well I should probably be getting back to my table...

 

I would like to give more details on the type of card feats that were performed but the funny thing about it is; to the magically uneducated like myself they all seem to blend together after a while. Magic, like wine, is one of those subjects that I wish someone would teach me more about so I could further appreciate the nuances of it. A little insight makes magic much more enjoyable, but for the moment I still remain completely mystified.

            As my gaze repeatedly traveled upwards, I looked for signs of previous hanging activity on the ceiling.  I saw nothing except the Kanji-painted, fabric draped from it.  Could it be that this hot young cheerleader had never fooled around with the team? Tao was the perfect venue for aerial. My architectural salivary glands watered. Visions of red and black silks swirling through the air, Kodo drums playing and martial artists fighting across the balconies filled my head as I daydreamed through dinner. I wanted to create a Buddhist-style show for the space. That week I forced my costume designer Garo to come with me to the Rubin Museum on 17th and 7th avenue. I wanted a unitard fashioned after a Bodhisattva statue. For the next few months I was completely obsessed with my new idea, so it came as no surprise when I finally received the call.

             Marc Packer and Richard Wolf (creators of the successful NY Club Marquee) opened Tao in 2000. They hired Thomas Schoos to design the interiors—Tao being his first restaurant commission.

            It was for their sixth anniversary party on November 17, 2006, when I first hung from her ceiling.

Rebecca Chase was the event planner—I have seen a lot of parties in my day and most of them are pretty repetitive. My favorite planners are the ones who are creative. Rebecca Chase and Larry Abel are the only two event planners that have ever surprised me. On this particular night, when you entered the bar area there were Fu Manchu mustache-wearing go-go boys at the entrance, and beautiful women laying in bubble baths in the bar. Body painted women walked naked throughout the entire restaurant. In the main dining room Rebecca had hung a platform between the two balconies, where women cavorted in a floating bed. It completely changed the look of the space. Cornelius II and his wife Alice were probably rolling in their graves all night.

            Although Cornelius II was reportedly an excellent accountant, but compared to his father he was a mediocre businessman. He didn’t expand the family empire. By virtue of the manner in which he lived, however, Cornelius II is fundamentally responsible for our image of the Vanderbilt name as that of ultimate New York style and pure opulence.

            As a young man Cornelius II devoted all his spare time to church work and as an adult he was a very generous philanthropist. He was a trustee of the College of Physicians and Surgeons and for years he was chairman of the executive committee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was upright to the point of being stuffy according to friends and family. His niece Consuelo said in her autobiography, “My father’s eldest brother Uncle Corneil, as we called him, was a stern and serious person, or so we thought. He was not gay like my father and Uncle Fred.”

As the new century began, the Vanderbilt group of railroads consisted of almost 20 thousand miles of track—the second largest group in the country. Their wealth was estimated at over 400 million dollars.

            When Cornelius II died in 1899, his brother William Kissam Vanderbilt took over the family business, and although it doesn’t concern our hero—the creator of this grand stable we now call Tao—I find it to be an interesting historical fact that by his hand came the electrification of trains in New York and the creation of the present Grand Central Station, opened in September 1906.

            In 1916, according to building records, the family converted the stable to a dance hall. In 1921 it appears to have been leased out to an antiques dealer named Clarke who opened a showroom. Cornelius’s widow Alice continued living in the house at One West 57th Street until it was sold in 1925. The house was demolished two years later.

            Leo Brecher leased the houseless stable in 1929, turning it into the Plaza Theater. With the architect Harry Creighton Ingalls, he altered the building, creating a 500-seat theater that was Tudor in style with a stucco exterior. Ingalls created a small balcony over the marquee, artificially aged the woodwork and installed a timbered ceiling.

            This is the ceiling that was to hold me through the night. I was there as a “swing-girl” with another woman I hired for the job. We were dressed in crazy Thai beaded costumes complete with 20 inch-high headdresses. Try swinging in a headdress! Not easy. The other difficult thing—remember this if you ever plan on hanging a swing—was that the swing was hung (without consulting me), nine feet above the ground. This is a really bad height for a swing. I’ll tell you why I’m still bitching about this two years after the fact: If the person on the swing wants to sit, their feet will be the height of your average guy’s head. Speaking from experience, at a party people never look where they’re walking. And Tao is one of those places in the city that has more than your average amount of professional athletes. I saw old no 11 (I’m a Yankee fan)– Gary Sheffield, among others that evening. These guys are giant-sized. I didn’t get to sit the whole night. Please—if you ever install a swing, hang it at least ten feet up to clear heads, or five feet off the ground, so as to completely bowl people over.

            I wouldn’t call it my most spectacular performance. However, I feel quite smug and include it here, because I was the first to hang from Tao’s beams. I knew that I would get another chance to shine. In fact, it came two months later, in January 2007.

            LVMH Moet/Hennessey had their holiday party a little late that year. The event was held on January 9, 2007. My friend Caroline got the call from Strategic Group. She asked me to plan the performance and set things up. At last I could break out the gold unitards and Kodo drum music I had had in my mind for so many months! Everything slid right into place.

 

Unfortunately 2006 hadn’t been the best year for the American Branch of Moet/Hennessey and the president, Bernard Arnault, decided to use their holiday party as a stage to voice his displeasure. Before dinner he gave a speech to his employees that made us want to cry. This was the act we had to follow. I gave myself a mental note to buy more Hennessey and Moet that year so his people wouldn’t have to go through the same speech in ‘08. In the end I guess we managed to raise spirits—people continued to clap as we passed the tables on the balcony and climbed the steps to our dressing room in the skybox. One small dream accomplished. 

My interview with William Kalush took place after the dinner at Tao and before both of my performances there.  As well as writing a bestselling book on Houdini, he is also the founder of the Conjuring Arts Research Center and the Hocus Pocus Project—a program that teaches magic to children and Veterans in NY hospitals. He is constantly working to find and translate old manuscripts pertaining to magic and is hosting the first New York History Conference. Recently he shot David Blaine in the mouth for a “bullet catch” stunt.

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Interview:  Bill Kalush  1/24/06

"Magic is a human thing.  I'm sure that people have used deception on each other and used it for entertainment for almost the entire existence of human beings."

NA:       I finally caught the "Street Magic Show" with David Blaine in Haiti and it was really good!

BK:      You saw the second one then.  He's been my buddy since I first moved to New York.  We'd always hang around this deli - a place called Rubin's - where there were all these magicians.

When I came to NY in 1992 I was into the magic scene and I knew just about everybody I guess.  There were two great old guys.  -They weren't that old.  Harry Lorraine was a great card guy - and a great memory expert - famous guy - and Frank Garcia who had been a performer his whole life - a little bit of a con artist sort and a good card guy too - very personable.  Some people hated him, some people loved him.  Anyway - these two guys had grown up together.  And something happened - I don't even know what it is.  And they just HATED each other - but they still both showed up at the same place - Rubin's - every Saturday!  And one group went to Lorraine's table, one went to Frank Garcia's and they didn't mix!   It wasn't allowed.  If you were in Lorraine's group you couldn't walk over to the Garcia table because then Lorraine would be mad at you. I think Blaine was at Harry's table.  But I was the "out-of-town" guy and I had enough credibility that I knew em both.  I'd walk back and forth between them - they had their own distinct little camps all in the same restaurant.  Every Saturday.  And the only kid that I didn't know who had any talent just kept pushing himself on me and trying to talk. It was Blaine and he's just this kid!  A skinny young kid that drives this beat up old white Honda that doesn't have a heater in the winter or air conditioner in the summer and barely makes it from New Jersey.  He became a pretty good friend. One day he comes to me and and tells me that ABC is gonna make a TV show with him and I'm like,  "yeah, right.  No way kid.  You're outta your mind".  You know - "even if they do you don't have the experience.  Those shows should be made by people that have more experience than you."  And he was probably rightfully offended by my words but he went and made the show.  I helped him a lot with the magic but not for the show specifically.  When the show aired I was in Michigan and I was floored.  I thought "This really works!"  "It's so good.  It's so different".  That was the street magic one where he levitated.  I called him immediately and I said,  "You know, that show is sensational and I'm proud of you.  If you ever want my help - I'm happy to help you."  And I've helped him with all his shows since then.

NA:    What kind of help did you give him?

BK:      Just help with the magic and just overall conceptual help. 

NA:    What tricks specifically did you teach him?

BK:            They're not tricks.  I don't like that word - "trick".  That's really demeaning.  I think that magicians shouldn't use it.  I think one of the reasons magic is not respected is because magicians themselves don't respect it very much.  I think "effect" or "magic piece" or "performance piece" - all of those things are not derogatory. 

NA:    Which "pieces" have you showed him?

BK:      Well - not that I showed him.  We create.  Part of what I'm interested in is the history and all this stuff that you see in this library.  There are ninety-two hundred books just on magic and that's not counting the books that aren't on magic. (For example)... we went back and we found the first kind of magic ever described in writing.  That we know of.  Ever.  And it's probably something like five thousand years ago.  A guy performs for King Cheops - you know, the pharaoh who built the great pyramids.  And it's a great effect; a guy taking a duck  (but we use a chicken)  and he cuts its head off right in front of you and then he puts its head back on.  And I thought about that and I thought,  "gosh, I could do that - I know how to do that."  We put that in one of the shows.  So I bring a historical prospective to it too. 

NA:         What's the appeal of magic?

BK:      I think every sort of (magical) effect has a different fundamental appeal, but I think that ultimately human beings are very romantic.  They want to believe.  Because we as human beings like to think of ourselves as more than just an automaton that runs through the motions then we die.  That's one of the reasons Houdini touched a nerve the whole world.   Because he created superman!  He could extricate himself in all circumstances from anything!  And all of us want a little bit of that.  We want to be part of the same race that has a guy that can do that.  Right?  I think a guy standing on stage in an ill-fitting tuxedo doesn't work.  I don't think it worked fifty/sixty years ago and I know it doesn't work now.  That's one of the reasons Blaine's so appealing.  He doesn't use any props - you don't see any boxes that look like they came from a shop-- he's just doing stuff.  And it's magic.  Wherever he is whether it's a street or a shop or whatever.  It just seems to happen.  And that appeals to people.  Humans are kind of two parts.  When you go to a movie and it's really quiet in a comfortable seat and there's nobody making noise and you get into that movie - BOOM you're in it!  And your logical side that knows that it's just film being shot through light onto the wall that was made in Hollywood with cameras and you know, catering vans and sets  -- that's all turned off.  Even though you know it's there that's turned off and the emotion of the story takes over.  The magic has to be the same thing to be successful.  Turn off the logic part of it. 

NA:    And for you personally?  Why did you get into it?

BK:      Magic.  I didn't pick it - it picked me.  I mean - you've heard that many times.  Who knows - maybe everybody else had more sense and got away from it.  A lot of young boys - and now there are starting to be young girls too who see empowerment by doing magic: they have a secret!  It's not the performance part of it.  Just having - and this would be the right term now.... A trick!  Okay.  It's not magic, but a trick that their friends don't have.  They don't tell, and now they have power over their friends.  And that's the appeal that most young boys go through.  

I don't know why I kept my interest in it.  I just don't know.  Sometimes its just aptitude.  I showed a lot of aptitude really young.  With cards. I don't lose interest with things I'm good at I only lose interest with things I'm not good at. 

My dad got me interested when I was a kid.  My dad was a gambler.  He didn't have any technical skills with cards - he wasn't a cheater.  He was a charming guy - really good at doing magic with cards.  He didn't do a lot of things, but even the littlest little mathematical thing - he completely sold it.  It didn't look mathematical.  It just looked like magic when he did it.  And he knew that.  He knew how to do the sales part of it.  He just knew it intuitively.

And then there was an old guy that taught me - he had been a great master - Karl Mainfort - who went all the way back to the thirties.

I was meeting him at this magic club that I was a member of.  He was like the oldest guy and I was the youngest guy.  We just hit it off.  It was in Lansing, Michigan.  He (Mainfort) had been great friends with a master named Cardini who was a brilliant slight-of-hand guy. On stage he could make cards, coins, balls disappear.   The way Cardini presented it --- he set the stage like he was coming into his own living room.  And he'd walk in he was just a little tipsy - and things are happening to him.  Things are appearing in his hands and he doesn't get it - he's throwing them down!  And he's like - a monocle just falls out of his eyes which is a great exclamation point for his surprise and balls were appearing and cigarettes!  He's just got cigarettes out of nowhere!  And it's brilliant.  So anyway -- this guy who taught me had been really close friends with him in the thirties.  And he did the whole act. - Except for the acting - I think Mainfort probably was just like seeing Cardini.  I mean he learned the act from him - he did all the moves the same way.  I was blown away as a kid seeing him. 

There's a really important book called "The Expert at the Card Table" published in 1902 anonymously - under a pseudonym.  It was by a guy who called himself S.W. Erdnase.  It's like the bible.  Everybody in magic is screaming for it.  When I was a kid I didn't know what it was but Mainfort's the one who told me when I was a kid you have to learn everything in this book - which I started to do at about 13 or 14.

Magic is a passion.  An avocation!  Although, I don't perform.  Yeah, I used to perform in college.  I helped put myself through school doing magic shows and all kinds of things but I wasn't actively doing shows.  There are a couple of reasons.  In the Business world either you do it or you don't do it.  You don't want to have people that you do millions of dollars a year in business with go to a restaurant and have you come over to their table.  There's a risk there.  So I don't do it any more.  I don't care about some guy telling me "here's some money, you have to do it".  I don't "have to do it" ever.  I can do it (magic) whenever I want to.  I don't ever do it when I don't want to.

NA:    Do you have a certain signature something you are proud of?

BK       This is going to mean nothing to anyone, but I have a special handling of "triumph" which is a classic effect invented by Guy Vernon.  Paul Harris -a really famous magician and I worked out this incredible handling. 

NA:    How did the Conjuring Arts Resource Center come about? 

BK:      I started collecting a while ago.  And then it got to a point where I just had so much material.  And it's all of some interest to me, but I wanted to make it more useful.  There's no other place like this - where you can get answers.  If we don't have it we can find it.  I think the magic world is a big community.  There should be some place somewhere where it's all focused.  It should be supported by the community at large, and it should have the greatest stuff that you can't get.  When I got to a point where I thought I had enough, and I had my own resources to help it exist, I started it. 

NA:    What are your future hopes for the library?

BK:            There's an awful lot of material that we want to digitize but digitizing every word in the magic domain is just the beginning part of it.  I want to start programs with ivy-league universities.  I want it to be a tie-in with the psychology of how magic really works.  When psychology first started as a field of study about a hundred and fifteen years ago, the first people they looked at were magicians.  And now they're coming back to it.  I'd like to get more of an interesting live magic scene going in this city too. 

NA:    What do you think of magic live as opposed to doing magic on TV?

BK:      Totally different thing.  Magic is a human thing.  I'm sure that people have used deception on each other and used it for entertainment for almost the entire existence of human beings.  That's what it's been.  So now, to do it on television puts a really interesting barrier between the performance and the spectator.   Which isn't quite the same as other arts like music.  Music you don't have to see. You don't have to watch an orchestra or band play.  You can listen to it.  So it's not so different coming out of a machine than it is to hear it live.  It does sound different but it's a technical difference - not so much a fundamental difference.

The first one to do something exciting on television with magic was Blaine.  He's the one that shifted where the focus of the camera is. 

Blaine took the camera outside and shows it so (you) the audience gets to be in on it a little bit.  You know he's a magician; he's from the street.  They (Blaine's volunteers) don't really know what's going on but you kinda know because you get to watch from a different perspective than you would even if you were there live because you have more information.  You see, he shifted it a little bit. 

I think magic on TV has potential but it's more fundamentally different to be on TV than it would be in other art forms. Even if it's selected card, it's somebody that's unbiased involved that's going to testify to its (magic's) success or failure.  Magic is interactive.  And that makes the television aspect fundamentally difficult.

NA:    Tell me about how you got your Houdini book deal. 

BK:      Just had this idea.  I had a hunch.  I've got pretty good instincts.  I had read a lot of Houdini stuff, but I wasn't an historian.  There were a lot of questions.  Things didn't work for me.  And I came up with a theory.  The only thing that kind of fit everything together was if he was getting some help from the government.  So we start digging.  And that's what we find.  Precisely.  Almost astonishingly!  He's out digging things up for the government on his trips.  And he's helping the people that have every opportunity to help him back.  He becomes an overnight success in America and then an overnight success in Britain.  It's really astonishing.  Lives this amazing life - his whole life he's famous.  And he just dies!  I was always suspicious of his death because he dies of a "ruptured appendix".  They say a guy hit him, and his appendix burst.  But I started looking for that.  And I started talking to doctors.  They started to tell me that it doesn't exist.  There's no such thing.  Nobody's ever been punched - except for Houdini - and had their appendix ruptured.  So I thought,  "Well that's really fishy".  So I find out that he dies of peritonitis, which is caused supposedly by this ruptured appendix.  But there's lots of things that can cause peritonitis.   We haven't isolated which ones, but even potentially poison.  And the weird thing is that while he's in the hospital with this peritonitis, his wife's in the hospital for poisoning.  And the doctor's come to her and say,  "Don't worry about your husband, you're the one who's much sicker."  He doesn't survive, she does.  And what we find is that the punch couldn't have had anything to do with it!  Houdini's just doing lectures!  And these guys coincidentally just show up in his dressing room and punch him!  All over a couple of days.  So we start looking into the letters and correspondence, which he's got a lot of.  Behind this he's struggling with these spiritualists.  That's what he's lecturing about (in Montreal)- against these fraudulent spiritualists.  And we find out that they're "predicting" things behind the scenes that Houdini's going to get his served.  And whether they did something to him- and it killed him - or if it was just the greatest coincidence in the world and great benefit for them - we haven't been able to figure out exactly.  I don't know for sure yet, but either way - Arthur Conan Doyle, who is perceived as this sort of Ronald Reaganesk kind of dufferish kind of guy - He's a real smart guy, he's got a medical degree, but he's just kind of silly - isn't silly at all.  He's controlling the whole thing like this master puppeteer from behind the scene.  And it's absolutely amazing what happened. 

It was too good to just go to some publisher.  So we wrote up a little treatment and invited sixteen publishers.  We made up this really cryptic invitation -(it didn't have a return address on it), that came with a card, these cryptic words and a pyramid shape, and then a coin.  Like an old 1902, 1903 coin.  At the bottom of the pyramid is like "Houdini's secret service",  "illuminati", things like that.  And at the bottom it says,  "to reveal the first of many mysteries, shake the coin in a class."  So when you did that, this real, old silver half-dollar broke in half.  And on the inside of the polished silver is an engraved message that says,  "For a look at Houdini, call this phone number." I mean they're real coins.  We had a guy that's not unknown to the U.S. secret service to make these for us.  It's not illegal to do it.  So every publisher that we sent them to called to make an appointment.  We had sixteen appointments in two days and they started fighting with each other over the book.  We had one-hour meetings.  Eight hours one day, and eight hours the next.

NA:    What makes a good magician?

BK:      Ah - that's an impossible question.  That's like saying, "What makes a good chef?"  or a good cook.  You can't.  Because some people cook some dishes well and other (dishes) not so well.  But there's a great misunderstanding about that.  People say that Houdini wasn't a great magician - a great escape artist but not a great magician.  Well, an escape artist is nothing more than a specialized magician.  You cannot be an escape artist without being a magician.  There is a method to it.  It's a man pretending to have - ACTING as though he has supernatural powers.

...You HAVE to create the appearance of real magic.  That's what I think a great magician does.  That doesn't make a great magician but that IS what he DOES.  A magician is an actor really.  Playing the part of somebody with real power.  A lot of magicians learn magic in kind of a singsong fashion.  And like I said they'll refer to magic as "tricks" and things like that.  It's diminutive and it's - well, they're behind the eight ball before they ever start.  ...It is - all of it-- has to be a performance. You have to perform.  Even if it's not a stage.  I mean, if somebody you meet on the corner does something miraculous it's a performance.  And it should be the appearance of magic.

You know you've got guys like David Copperfield.  You go see David Copperfield's show and I don't know who you are but you're gonna sit there and be blown away! I mean his show is really amazing.  He does stunning stuff and he's really, really clever and it's really good and they create great stuff.  I sat at his show a month ago.  In Vegas.  And I have to tell ya - he fooled me over and over - he makes a Buick appear on a small stage!  A real - I mean I assume its real maybe it doesn't have an engine, maybe it does but it's a big metal car.  With tires!  You know, it's a car.  It's not a piece of cardboard.  It appears out of nowhere!  He's got a piece of cloth, and he takes it down and it's there.  I have no idea where it comes from!  It's not even possible in my mind how they could do that.  Even if you could somehow fold it!  He makes somebody disappear on a platform that's out over the audience. Boom.  The guy's gone.  I've no idea how these things work.  But David Copperfield - as brilliant as he is at what he does, If you do a newspaper search, you'll find out that last year, 2005, Houdini's name is in the paper more often than David Copperfield.  And he's (Copperfield) the biggest, most successful, most famous living magician and the old dead guy who captured the real mythological status is still being talked about more.  So, there's kind of been a gap.  And there's an opportunity I think for a magician to grab that again, but so far nobody's done it.