Word: jay
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...eight of clubs, which had gone missing, had no business turning up where it did. No way. Except Ricky Jay...
...happened last week, midway through the performance of Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants, a dextrous, funny and entirely elegant revue of card conjuring at an off-Broadway theater in Manhattan. The missing card, boldly marked and closely watched, appeared -- after several comic digressions -- in a totally unexpected place that only a master manipulator can navigate (and that would be wrong to divulge here...
...audience, thoroughly flummoxed, responded with prolonged applause. As the full-bearded, heavyset Ricky Jay stepped forward to take a bow, a voice shouted from the fourth row, "How did you do that?" "I wasn't aware," replied the conjurer, allowing himself a small smile, "that we'd come to the question-and-answer portion of the show...
...scale an ordinary playing card across the stage with such force that it pierces a watermelon, and can rocket a card to decapitate a plastic duck. He can make a card rise from the deck as if by levitation, or tear one up and make it reappear whole. In Jay's supple hands, what is commonly known as a card trick is something approaching art. To watch him work a deck is to see him write haiku in the air, four times a week and three times on weekends...
...anyone whose notions of magic are bounded on the one side by the rattle and roll of Penn & Teller and, on the other, by the glitzoramas of David Copperfield, the Jay show will seem highly unconventional, perhaps even radical. "Other magicians are more prone to showing off, to 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...