Re: I found a new outlet for my creative and outgoing personallity

[Patte Rosebank]

I like magic because it involves knowledge that most people don’t have (and you know how much we love unusual facts), and a strong performance style. Big gestures, special props, costumes, and a build-up to a big finish on every trick—instant gratification! Unlike, say, opera, which also uses big gestures, special props, and costumes, but you have to wait for hours before the big finish.

The other neat thing about magic is that it’s a special skill, and you never know when it’ll come in handy. Rick has talked about spending hours, as a kid, practising tricks until he perfected them. Years later, he used those skills in a sketch on “Four on the Floor”, in which he played an adulterous magician, who tormented his suspicious wife with his tricks, while calmly insisting that there was no “other woman” there. In another sketch, he rode a unicycle. I wonder when he learned how to do that.

A magician’s ability to figure out how to create an illusion is also very useful in the world of film and television, when you have to create a special effect, live on camera at the time of filming—as was the case all through “Red Green”. George Melies and Larry Semon were two very early filmmakers who were also skilled magicians, and used those skills in their films. Semon was so good at creating illusions that it’s very possible he may have faked his own death to escape the massive debts that had bankrupted him and cost him his studio.

Aren’t transferrable skills great?

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