My Charmed Life

As a professional magician, when I pull off the perfect trick, the audience’s wonder and joy is no illusion.

- Nate Staniforth

I became a magician by accident. When I was nine years old, I learned how to make a coin disappear. I’d just finished The Lord of the Rings and ventured into the adult section of the library in Ames, Iowa, to search for a book of spells—nine being that age at which you’re old enough to work through

more than 1,200 pages of arcane fantasy literature but young enough to still hold out hope that you might find a book of real, actual magic. The volume I discovered instead taught basic sleight-of-hand techniques, and I dedicated the next few months to practice.

At first, the magic wasn’t any good. It wasn’t even magic; it was just a trick—a bad trick. I spent hours each day in the bathroom running through the secret moves in front of the mirror. I dropped the coin over and over, 1,000 times a day, and after two weeks of this my mom placed a carpet sample from the hardware store below where I’d stand to mue the sound.

Throughout my childhood, I had heard my dad work through passages of new music on the piano, so I knew how to practise—slowly, deliberately, going for precision rather than speed. One day I tried the illusion in front of the mirror and the coin vanished. It did not look like a trick. It looked like a miracle.

ONE OF THE LESSONS you learn early on as a magician is that the most amazing part of a trick has nothing to do with the secret, which is simple and often dull: a hidden piece of tape, a small mirror, a duplicate playing card. In this case, the secret was a series of covert manoeuvres to hide the coin behind my hand in the act of opening it, a dance of the Fingers that I learned so completely I didn’t even have to think. I would close my hand, then open it, and the coin would vanish.