Tricks as a trade

Suburban magicians belong to a storied tradition

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By Benjie Hughes
sun news services

Forget the trick. There is no trick.

Well, fine — there is a trick. But it is nothing. Just a trick. A puzzle. That's not magic.

So rehearse the trick until it feels like nothing, until you can do it without thinking. Then, think about how to make it magic.

That's where it gets fun. Magic is "the second-oldest profession," said South Elgin magician Chuck Romano. And, he adds, it's an art form.

"The real magic's up here," Romano said, pointing at his head. Then he makes a gold coin vanish from his hand. "It's not what you do, it's how you do it. It's truly an expression of the performer."

Which is how so many performers in the suburbs can all be so very different. Romano, also a collector and historian, tells tales of magic's past while he transforms handkerchiefs into eggs. Meanwhile, a man in Naperville is sawing women into pieces. A couple in Geneva clambers into barrels, then sticks swords inside, while someone in Batavia is telling jokes and reading minds. On a basic level, their tricks are all the same. But their performances are very, very different.

Malleable magic

Dave Mayer is a full-time "Christian illusionist" living in St. Charles. To make ends meet he performs more than 200 school, daycare, birthday-party and church shows every year. Sitting in a breakfast restaurant on a Monday morning, he orders a glass of orange juice and produces a list of 10 "principles" of magic. These are the basic things magicians do, he said, such as make something appear and disappear, transform it into something else, make one thing penetrate another. If magic were music, these would be the notes.

Mayer's approach is to use magic as an illustration. At schools he talks about reading or self-esteem; at churches it's Jesus and redemption. He starts with the message and he builds his show from there.

"If you're at a trade show talking about a company's power to produce something, you're going to use a principle of production," Mayer said. "If you're talking about the power of God to take away sins, to cleanse us and wash us and make us a new person, then you're going to use a principle of vanish."

It's the same thing for Mark Holstein. When he works corporate shows, he said, half the challenge is building a trick to suit his client. "It's fun," the Geneva resident said. "It's kind of an interesting challenge when someone says, 'Here's our product; how can we do some magic with it?'"

Batavia magician Ken Mate works in similar circles.

"What I really do is take these tricks and turn them into presentations," he said. "Sales presentations." It's a simple step, he explained, from conjuring a rabbit to conjuring a new product. Or, instead of whipping up a girl assistant, you whip up the incoming CEO.

Of course, Mate's particular twist is comedy — which means he's just as likely to make the CEO's head spin around, or "accidentally" staple someone's tie to a workbench. Mate spends hours studying the likes of Jackie Mason and Rodney Dangerfield, borrowing formulas and refining one-liners to fit his act. His tricks go horribly wrong — on purpose. He fills up empty space with verbal gags: "When my wife cooks, she uses the smoke alarm — when it's off, dinner's on." And he gives members of his audience a hard time.

"If you move during a show, you're a target," Mate says. "Some people are afraid to get up to go to the bathroom."

Holstein's approach is slightly different. He's a lawyer; his wife, Sue, works as a counselor and motivational speaker. They perform together to keep "more or less sane."

"Our neighbors are used to seeing all kinds of unusual things in the garage," Sue Holstein said.

They're not the only ones. In Naperville, Steve Cesare — he performs as Chezaday — has a garage full of heavy boxes on castors.

"This one is a bed of spikes that goes through an audience member," he said, unfolding several flaps to turn the box into a few square feet of sharpened metal terror. "Something like this is probably a seven or eight thousand dollar illusion — you see a box, you see some spikes, but obviously there's some tricky stuff going on too."

Chezaday should know — he builds illusions in his basement. The big room downstairs looks like a typical workshop, with saws and drills and four stacked shelves of spray paint, right up to the ceiling. Right now he's building miniature outhouses that explode — there is a mousetrap in the middle — when you drop a coin inside. A Britney Spears poster adorns one wall; a KISS calendar hangs by the door.

Chezaday's a rock 'n' roller.

"I'm a mix of Batman from the original series, (1970s magician) Doug Henning and KISS," he said. His large-scale illusion show involves plenty of pyrotechnics, flashing lights and — yes — a spandex costume with a lightning bolt on the chest. The lady who made it for him sews ice-skater outfits. This one even has a cape. He has a special, heavy one for winter shows.

There are three women, all dancers, in Chezaday's big show. He calls them the Chezababes. They tour the country with two technical assistants for most of the summer, levitating women from guitars and cutting them up various ways in various boxes.

Sometimes when they arrive and set up, people ask Chezaday when the band will start. Other times, children have asked him whether he's a wrestler. Sorry, he says. I just do a magic show.

And then he unpacks his guitar.

Tradition of tricks

In Geneva, the godfather is still working.

Marshall Brodien helped make most of today's magicians. He spent much of the '70s pitching his "TV Magic Cards" and magic kits on television, winning over countless young performers to the art of magic. Ken Mate started with those kits. So did Mark Holstein. So did Chuck Romano.

Now they all know Brodien — and each other — personally. They are a community; they work together, trade ideas, create illusions for each other. They fill in as each other's assistants.

Brodien began at age 8, when a lady magician visited his school and fascinated him with her performance. Since then he's lived dozens of stories. He's worked as a hypnotist — the surprising part, he said, is that when you hypnotize a drunk they wake up sober. He has swallowed swords — if you eat a good steak first, he said, you can get a few more inches without puncturing your stomach.

"It's all the presentation," Marshall Brodien said. "How you sell it, how you do the trick."

In the TV Magic Cards commercials, Brodien put it another way: "Most magic tricks are easy," he said, "once you know the secret."

Not the trick. The secret.