“It’s fun to be fooled,” Jay Marshall asserts. Marshall has been a performing magician, ventriloquist, and puppeteer for more than 50 years. (One of his ventriloquist’s props–a glove called Lefty–is in the Smithsonian.) He also owns and runs with his wife, Frances, Magic, Inc., the famous north-side store and mail-order business that sells everything from magic wands ($2) to sculptured ventriloquial figures ($500–and for that price, it would be declasse to call them dummies). He insists that time has not dulled the pleasure he experiences when the proverbial whatnot is pulled over his eyes.
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Marshall’s friend, Tommy Edwards, concurs. It’s not only fun to be fooled, it’s also fun to do the fooling. Although Edwards earns a living investing in real estate these days, he’s been doing magic since he was six or seven, including three years as a full-time professional. “Magic got me through everything pretty well,” Edwards says. “It got you a lot of privileges–in high school, in the service. It helped put me through college. It’s great. I’m a face that’s lost in the crowd, but you do a trick, they remember you. It’s an ego thing, I guess. Someone applauding you, that’s tremendous.”
I am less than thrilled with this characterization, and vow to learn magic immediately. And, in fact, I leave the store a while later knowing how to wiggle a common, ordinary, yellow number-two pencil so that it appears to be made of rubber. I know just what it is one does when one makes a coin seem to be in one hand when it is actually in the other–although I lack the skill to actually pull it off. Perhaps I’ll go back for a ball and vase ($2.50)–recommended by Tommy Edwards as the best trick for the beginner, and, indeed, the very one he started with as a lad.
