Word: houdin
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...also the pinnacle of fame for sleight-of-hand magicians, such as Robert Houdin...
...letting us see how good they are," says Jules Fisher, who did the lighting for the show and who studies magic with Jay. "But Ricky's virtuosity is hidden." The show's scale and intimacy hark back to the 19th century tradition of such masters as Robert Houdin (from whom Houdini extracted his own stage name), and, along with card manipulations and effortless demonstrations of false dealing and three-card monte technique, Jay delivers a limber-fingered course in magic history and gambling ploys...
...just that. In a piece on folk recipes-a pint of warm beer stirred with a hot poker will cure backache, a slab of raw beef will rub away a wart-the reporter edges deliciously close to magic herself. Even the inventory of the purple velvet handbag of Mme. Houdin, ten-year-old Sylvia's French tutor, becomes a litany of talismans to ward off disaster: smelling salts, two thimbles, a photograph of M. Houdin, the number of madame's life-insurance policy, and "a rather neglected rosary...
Chop-Chop Cups. The conjurers had forgotten that their heroes were also afflicted with nostalgia, that Houdini himself had borrowed his name from an earlier performer, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, a 19th century French prestidigitator. Moreover, as the magicians should have known, scientists are the easiest to fool. They seek rational explanations for contrived phenomena, connections where none exist. Magicians were in fact doing what they had always persuaded their audiences to do: they were looking the wrong way. "We magicians are notorious for staring in the rear-view mirror," says Semipro Charles Reynolds, picture editor of Popular...
...Harry Houdini, existence itself was a search for escape. First he had to break away from his family; life on Manhattan's East Side as Ehrich Weiss, son of scholarly Rabbi Mayer Weiss, was not for him. So he studied the memoirs of French Magician Robert Houdin, changed his own name to Houdini, learned a little clumsy sleight of hand, and started to play the dime museums and carnivals that flourished in the late 19th century. He was a flop, and he had to break out of that situation, too. He concentrated on the art of escape itself. Handcuffs...