This is fresh air, I'm Terry Gross. Ricky J has been called the greatest living slight of hand artist. When he's working with a deck of cards, it's as if he lives in a different dimension than we do, where the laws of physics have been altered. He makes cards disappear and reappear and move to different places in ways that we know are impossible, but as the late Ross Wetsting said in The Village Voice, he doesn't make us pigeons, but transforms us into awestruck witnesses of what seem like miracles.
He transfigures conjuring into poetry. A few months ago when Ricky J did his one man card show, Ricky J and his 52 assistants, the New York Times ran an editorial and praise of him. It's not just what he does, that's amazing. It's what he knows.
He's a scholar of con games, conjuring unusual entertainers and human oddities. Ricky J profiled some of these performers in his book, Learn It Pigs and Fireproof Women, which will be published in a new edition this fall. He's played some pretty strange and sinister characters in the movies. He's been in the David Mamet films, House of Games, Homicide and the Spanish Prisoner.
In the latest James Bond film, he played the number two heavy Henry Gupta, the man said to have practically invented techno terrorism. In Boogie Nights, he played the cameraman who shoots the porno films. My interview with Ricky J was recorded in May at the Herps Theatre in San Francisco in an event co-sponsored by Fresh Air and City Arts and Lectures of San Francisco. Fresh Air was in town for the annual public radio conference.
Before we meet Ricky J, let's hear a scene from the David Mamet film House of Games. Lindsey Kraus plays a psychologist who's being introduced to the underworld of con man. Her guide is a con man played by Joe Mantegna. He's brought her to a poker game, but Mantegna has just lost a lot of money in this game and he's accusing Ricky J of cheating him.
What the f*** are you doing with the flush? That'd be trips where you come from? Give me that f***ing money. We lost.
I have gathered that. Oh yeah. And if you think I'm leaving here without that check, you're out of your mother f***ing mind. Hey, look, I'll look later now.
Give me that money. Okay, okay, okay. Give me a moment, will you? Because I won that money from you, baby.
I'll give it when I get to it. Now don't get pushy. Pushy, Jim. Pushy.
You don't know what pushy is? Now give me my $6,000. Please welcome, man, you don't want to play cards with Ricky J. Now people might get the impression from that, that you are just a really sinister figure in the real world.
Now in your act, you are the gentleman con man. I mean, when you perform, you have this eloquent language that you use, but we'll get to that a little bit later. Now why card handling? Your thing is card handling.
This is one chooses what they'd like to do with women. And so I'm going to have to never struck me. No, no. No, no.
No, what you do is surrounded by secrecy. You don't tell, you don't explain how you do the tricks. And magicians on the whole don't explain things. I know you apprentice two of the people who you consider to be among the greatest in their fields, Divern and Charles Miller.
Tell us a little bit about what they did that made you want to follow them. Well, I think in my mind, they really are the two great side of hand artists of the past century. I mean, that's tricky too. I find these labels awfully tough to deal with and I don't usually choose to deal with them at all.
It's probably safer to say they were just remarkable. And I suppose Vernon is genuinely known as this amazing figure in the art. For one thing, he literally spanned the century. And I wrote a piece about him once in Buzz Magazine in Los Angeles saying that if he had never done magic, he would have been the most amazing man I'd ever met.
I mean, this is a fellow who attended the Scopes Trial, the famous monkey trial where he cut silhouettes. He made his living a large portion of his life cutting silhouettes to allow him to have the time to sit in a room with a deck of cards or a couple of coins and think about slight of hand. He was always sort of a reluctant performer. And his great pleasure came in really inventing and shaping the pieces of the art of sleight of hand.
Charlie, amazingly enough, was actually a more willing performer. And his venue, at least in the years that I knew him, was largely cruise ships. And not only was he a wonderful sleight of handman, but he was a very good ballroom dancer. So he was particularly well appreciated on cruise ships.
When you were hanging around with him, did they do things to kind of shock and surprise you? Would they ever do something that you were totally unprepared for an act of magic inserted into real life? Well, not quite. But you do remind, first of all, let's talk about them.
They were so different, even though they were great friends and great friends of mine. They were so different. Almost any sentence where I'm trying to put both of them in, it's kind of tough for me. But I will tell you a strange thing.
My home club when I first came out from Los Angeles, to Los Angeles from New York, was a wonderful place, which is still around called McCabe's Guitar Shop, which for, I don't know, probably 30 years now has presented concerts, usually of an acoustic nature. And I think I was the first non-music actor I've ever worked at, but for years, traditionally, I would work out my new material there. And one day I came up with a rather odd premise. And that premise was that I would pretend, well, that I would hypnotize a number of people from the audience and then teach them to do slides with cards in post-hypnotic suggestion and see what would happen.
And this was, as one might imagine, a completely improvisational exercise, although I stacked the deck, as I will explain a little later. So I brought out, I asked for volunteers, and a number of people raised their hands, and five people came up to the stage. And the first of them was a fellow who would expect to find a McCabe's Guitar Shop with kind of long hair up a light fellow. A guy you could have expected to be playing a Doc Watson tune badly.
And next to him was a young woman. And then there was a kind of nondescript fellow, and maybe about 30 in the center. And another man about the same age, and then a very old man next to him. And I started saying, I'm going to count backwards from 10.
I want you to fall into sleep 10, 9, 8, deep, deep, deep, where you're like, well, I know nothing about hypnosis. And I guess this is a good time to tell you four of those five people were friends of mine. And the man in the middle, I didn't know at all. And I said, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 sleep.
And this fellow in the middle immediately goes out. His head hits his chest, and he's there in a trance. And I realize I've probably done something very bad here. But how am I going to get out of this?
So I now give this post-hypnotic suggestion. You'll all be able to do these manipulations. And I show various stunts with the cards. And I now say, wake up.
And when I say this word, whatever the signal word is, you'll be able to do this stunt with cards. And I make a fan for this first man. I just like to use the old man first. And I make a fan of cards for him.
A very nice fan. And I hand him the cards and say the word. And he now makes a fan with these cards. By now you've gathered that this is, in fact, I've heard it in his 80s.
And the reason that I thought of the story, it was so surprising to me. It was so realistic that for a second, I believed he had never had cards in his hand. It was quite extraordinary. And he made the perfect shape of cards.
But in a way that looked like he'd never done it before, with his hands kind of shaking and drawing the cards out. And I said to him, do you play cards? And he said, no, chest, play chest. You know?
And people sure they weren't sure what to do. And OK, so now I give the cards to this woman. And I do a more serious double fan. And I hand her the cards.
And she does this just absolutely perfectly. And now the guy in the middle, who knows nothing, is elbowing the other guy. Isn't this great? I'm just really amazing.
And I say to him now, I'd like it now. I say, do you handle cards? So the fellow I don't know. And he said, oh, all the time.
And I'm thinking, well, if he actually does something, this is going to be awful. This is not going to be good. So I do a much harder slide. I do what's called a one hand riffle shuffle.
And I break the deck and shuffle it with one hand. And this guy just very cuckly takes the cards in his hand. And I'm quite stunned. And then he puts them in his hand.
He tries to absolutely mimic this movement. He chops all the cards on the floor, which is the perfect thing to happen. And the audience laughs. And I give the next guy the nudge, meaning get the feed off him.
And I don't want this fellow to feel uncomfortable. But it was wonderful the way he absolutely assumed he would be able to do this. So I now hand him to the next guy. He's another friend of mine.
And I say, do you play cards? And he says, no, not really, when do something. And he does something and purposely shoots the cards all over the ground to make the first guy feel a little better, which is, I think the way it should go. And then the last guy, I ask about doing something, and he says, not cards.
And I said, well, do you do anything else? And he said, no, nothing like this at all. and this guy was one of the great jugglers in the world. This poor guy in the middle is having a very tough time.
He asked me if he could go again. You know, it's just great. And of course he dropped the cards all over the floor again. And then I introduced everybody.
You know, I introduced the juggler, the other man. And then Vernon, when I told him who Vernon was, they gave him a standing ovation. But it really was, you know, a wonderfully surprising moment of him making this fan of cards. We're listening to an interview with Slight of Hand Artist Ricky J, a master Slight of Hand Artist, and a scholar of magic, con games, and human oddities.
Now, you not only know a lot about cards, you know a lot about the history of con games. I'm interested, yeah. No. In the movie we just saw in House of Games, Joe Mantegna, when he's teaching Lindsey Krauss about cons, he says, people think a confidence game is when you give the con man your trust.
But a confidence game starts when the con man gives you his trust. Is that true? I think it's a lovely subtlety. I've never seen that particular point mentioned by anyone, but ma'am it.
But I think it is a lovely thing. You want to be able to do that. You want to be able to trust someone. A couple of times I've interviewed about cons specifically, and the point that comes to me, and it's hardly profound, is that I don't think any of us would want to live in an atmosphere where we couldn't be conned.
Because we would be so skeptical of everything in life that it would be a horrible way to live. So on some level we have to do that. And the confidence man is able to inspire that by acting in con. It's very important.
Tell us a con game that you find particularly interesting. Again, it's nice. Just your questions are making me think of things. And I'll tell you a story from House of Games.
There's a moment in House of Games. I try to make this simple. Where Mike Nussbaum, who plays the older con man, a wonderful actor, is showing Lindsey a hustle. It's one of a variety of hustles called Laying the Note, which deal with short change in various ways.
And in this particular case, the idea is a man comes over to a cashier, and he says that he wants to send his mother $20 because she needs it. And I actually think Joey Montane says in the film, another wonderful man, like, make her your aunt. It sounds more pathetic. Much of just like that.
So and he has a bunch of signals. And so he says, here, count them out there 20. And meanwhile, he's given a $20 bill in return. And when the cashier counts them out, he realizes they're only 19.
Meanwhile, you've seen the con man very clearly take the $20 bill and seal it in an envelope. And now the cashier said, you only gave me 19. And the con man takes the 19 singles back. He hands the cashier the envelope at the 20.
And he says, I must have left one in the car. Hold on, I'll be back. And the cashier isn't worried because he's a dollar ahead of the transaction at this point. And the con man goes out to his car and never comes back.
And when the cashier does open the envelope, where very plainly there was a $20 bill a moment ago, there's only a piece of newspaper. And so he's been conned. And when David wrote his version of this initially, which had nothing to do with an envelope or these bills, there was something he said to me, how is that? And I said, it's very good.
And he said to me, that bet. And I said, well, there's some verisimility. Anyway, we had a small problem with that moment. And he asked me if I would come up with a solution.
So I was in a difficult position. As someone who loves the con and still have friends who actually make their living laying the note, I didn't want to betray something that they would do. And so as a consultant, I did what I'm often asked to do, which is to think of a method that would be appealing for the context in which it was used in this case of film. And I came up with a method of stealing the $20 bill that's shown in the film.
And it worked for us in this context. The film came out. It seemed to do well. People liked the scene.
About six months later, a friend of mine who investigates Bunko stuff for the police, sent me a clipping from Denver, which said, con man arrested, learn technique from house of games. And so here, this is an amazing case of already imitating life, imitating art. I mean, I'm purposely using a method that wasn't real. Coming up with a method that I think was original.
And putting it in a film. And a man who was an insurance salesman, this was funny. This wasn't a crook. But he saw it and he really liked it.
And he thought, well, can I do this? And he went out and he did it eight or nine times in Denver. And he was only caught. He was never caught in the transaction.
Once a woman was explaining what happened to her, to a policeman, she said, two weeks ago a guy did it. There he is. And they ran and grabbed the gun. And I remember sending this flipping to Mamet with a note saying, this is clearly the only practical thing I've ever done in my life.
So what is your code of ethics as someone who knows a lot about con? And it says, part of the code is to protect the con man. Would you ever? I guess I did just imply that, didn't I?
Would you ever run a con on somebody? Have you ever done that? Would I? No.
No, not I. I have a company which consults on film that's called Deceptive Practices. And Armato, Armato on the card, it says Deceptive Practices. And then underneath it says, arcane knowledge on a need to know basis.
And that is, in fact, the way that I deal with people in the film world or the theater world or the television world, if I'm consulting, which is that if a director has to know how a piece works, to shoot it better, I'll tell them unhesitatingly. Well, I'll tell them hesitatingly. But I will tell them. And if they don't have to know, I'm just not interested in the gratuitous exposure of this kind of material at all.
So I won't tell them. No, you, as I mentioned, you're an expert on the history of really odd and eccentric performers. And you were in a carnival yourself, briefly, as a barker. And I had to ask you to do this on French here.
I'm going to ask you again to just give us a sense of what your rap was. Oh, the pitch? I just pitched when you were a carnival barker. Yeah, it's called the Ballet, more technically, on the platform.
Yeah, I ran a 10-in-one show for her. What is a 10-in-one show? It means 10 attractions under a single tent. So you pay one admission and you get 10 acts.
There could be a five-in-one or a 10-in-one. I wish you would have asked me about this earlier, so I could have thought about it. But I have a feeling once I start it'll probably come back. Showtime, circus time, see the magician, the fine-man-appellator, the girl-yellow elastic tissue, the electrode lady.
Yes, the electrode lady at the age of seven, she and her sister were struck by lightning. Her sister died. But she lived to tell the tale 20,000 volts of electricity through the young girl's body. The doctor said she lived because she was immune to the shock of electricity.
See the monster child, the monster child from Johannesburg sat out of the monster child with one head, two bodies, three arms, and four legs. You read about me, you're reading about it in the National in Quiara. See Adam and Eve, boy and girl, brother and sister, all in one of the worlds, three living morphodites, who will expose itself not to be root of Olga, but to show you one of Mother Nature's curious and the stage show time, circus time, let's go be going. They're all on the inside.
They're on the inside. Did you write that yourself? No, far from writing it, it's very much part of an oral tradition, including the mispronunciation of words like morphodite for homophoride and curious, recurious. And often, the guys I knew doing the Valley were illiterate.
I mean, they learned the pitch, they were handed down. And yet, pictures were topical. For instance, what in one year might have been the giant rat of Sumatra during the Vietnam war would become the giant rat of Cambodia. Or a deformed animal might be presented as having come from near the nuclear testing site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, or later, Hershey, Pennsylvania.
And so that was the one thing I loved about the pictures, is that they would vary depending on topical news. Now, didn't you do an electric chair act with a woman? I did, yeah, as part of that carnival. The electric chair was basically a woman sat in a chair, and you would walk up to her and hold an electric light bulb, or a fluorescent bulb, to various parts of her body, and they would light.
And the finale was usually that she would hold out her tongue. And you would like to bulb out her tongue. And so it would look like she was getting electrified. Well, it was never really specified.
I mean, it did. And then it was another thing that we did with the girl afterwards, which was called the blow off, which is you then put the girl in a box. And you put her in this box, and then take her dress off while she's in the box, approving she has yellow elastic tissue because the box would seem to be too small for her. You would put swords in the box as well.
Take them out, then take the dress off. And for an extra $0.25 or $0.50, you would allow people to come up. Please come up and look at the box, but realize the lady lives entirely on the proceeds from the box. And what she didn't, by the way, the owner would take far more of the proceeds than he ever gave the girl.
And then the say at blow off as it was called as he would come up, and she would, of course, be wearing a bathing suit. So there was yet another con on top of the con. So how did she light up when you would hold the light bulb on her? I'd say that that was arcane knowledge on the need to know basis.
Ricky J, recorded in May at the Herbs Theater in San Francisco. You have something called the Journal of Anomalies. It's a quarterly that you publish that kind of just profiles eccentric performers from throughout history. Now strikes me now.
These are the kinds of people who might have been in freak shows or something. And now it would be so politically incorrect in a way to have a freak show, which is to stare at people who have no arms or legs, even if they can juggle anyways. So do you wish that there was a way of people like that presenting their act today without us considering it politically incorrect or exploited? This is a very difficult issue, because normally the showman will tell you if you talk to the act, whether it's someone with a physical deformity who's making their living by presenting that deformity, that these people would prefer to do that, then they would to sit in home and be unable to earn their own limits.
And I think that's a point well taken. I mean, I understand the political correctness issue. And there are clearly some performers who have been horrendously exploited, which is the other side of that. But there are many people who did these acts with dignity.
I mean, I think my favorite is a man called Matthew Boekinger, who I've spoken about a lot. It was born in 1674. Since you mentioned, had no arms or legs, was 28 inches tall, played eight or nine musical instruments, did trick bowling shots through swords at a target, danced at the horn pipe, did magic beautifully, slightly of hand beautifully, cups and balls and card and coin effects, and coincidentally had four wives and 14 children. So have you met any people like that?
Like when you were doing card shots? If I could go back in history and meet Matthew Boekinger, I would be so happy. Why? Why would you be so happy?
I mean, I think in many ways he's the most remarkable man that I've ever read. But I think in all the things I've collected, I very seriously collect memorabilia, books, playbills, materials about these people who interest me. And none of my holdings are more remarkable to me than the works of Matthew Boekinger. For one thing, he was an extraordinary calligrapher.
He had pretty much, I guess what these days we might call a thalidomide fins. And he was able to squeeze his two hands together. And that's how he would do the cups and balls. And so think about that as well, that normally when a magician would perform something with objects like that, you would think that he would use one hand to move the cup and distract your attention from some illicit slight that he might be doing with the other.
Where Boekinger clearly needed both hands to move a cup or to move a deck of cards. But he also did this calligraphy that's utterly extraordinary. And for some reason, unknown to me, I've been remarkably fortunate in gathering original materials of his. I just got one very recently, which is a piece that he did in 1730 that I guess could best be described as an architectural drawing.
It's about 20 by 11 inches, something like that, which is very large for him. And when he was about 55 years of age, which every square inch of this drawing is filled with the most remarkable filigree panels and letters and the central images of the 10 commandments, the two tablets within this architectural framework of columns. And then it goes to the creed and the most minuscule, much smaller than the size of a dime, the complete Lord's Prayer, dotted micro-collegrific on vellum with pen and ink in 1730. I mean, these things are extraordinary.
They're amazing. I mean, this was a fellow who I'm sure showed a lot of pain and suffering in the doing of the miniature work. Also with someone who was a major figure of his time. I have a broadside of him that literally calls him the greatest German living, a broadside from 726.
I mean, he was incredibly well known. And there's a little, almost like poem that goes along with that. See, gallons, wonder, and behold, this German of imperfect mold. No legs, no feet, no arms, no hands, yet and all that art can do commands.
First thing he does, he strikes a letter. No Elsavirian type is better. I mean, it's just wonderful. Yeah, the recognition that he achieved doing these marvelous things.
I mean, I would have loved to have spent time with him. I thought the language that goes along with you. Oh, so why? And when you perform, you have, you use an almost Victorian language in your show, I think.
It's a very colorful pattern. It would be simpler to say I just overwrite, I suppose. Yeah. You were introduced to Magic.
I think that your grandfather, when you were, what was his Magic act like? He didn't so much do an act. At times during the Second World War, he did perform for service, and he did USO shows. And so I imagine he did an act that's before I was born.
He was an amateur in, I think, the best sense of the word. He was a lover of magic. And he was just interested. And he took lessons from remarkable people and was a very patient and good teacher.
And so it certainly inspired me. And did he teach you things? Oh, yes, absolutely. Very specifically and absolutely.
And then not only did he, but he got the great people of the day who were also his friends and his teachers to spend time with me as well. Like Slideenie. Like Slideenie. Who was Slideenie?
Well, Slideenie was an Italian man who lived in the city who did this wonderfully poetic magic and was a wonderfully artistic fellow. I mean, he actually made me in those years. He was a wonderful tailor. And he made suits that were like Spanish Toriador outfits, where every flower was dyed by hand and put on with sequins.
And that's what I actually performed in when I was a young boy, 13 or 14, and with penciled in sideburns. And I suppose when I was about 15 or 16, I realized that I very much wanted to make a cane float in my act. And suddenly it dawned on me that most people in the Tori ador outfit wouldn't actually have the kind of cane that a company that a top hat and tail coat. And that's when I think I really concentrated on cards.
But Slideenie was wonderful. And he was considered a master of misdirection of the art of well, I always like to deal with the concept of misdirection positively rather than negatively. The idea was to direct an audience's attention exactly where he wanted it directed. But Slideenie was a man who did miracles.
He would take a cigarette from someone, a lit cigarette, and clearly break it in half and show you both halves of the cigarette and roll it between his finger and hand back a perfectly restored cigarette. I mean, it was as close to real magic as you could hope for. We're listening to an interview with Slight of Hand artist Ricky J. Recorded in May at the Herbs Theater in San Francisco.
No, your grandfather presented Magic Axe. And sometimes, and one of the people he presented, Theodore Animan, was going to do the famous bullet-catching trick, which I think I've seen Penn and Teller do that version of that more recently. But anyways, I think right before your grandfather was going to present him, he committed suicide. That must have been pretty upsetting for you.
You must have been pretty excited that this was going to happen and everything else. Again, it's actually happened before I was born. Oh, oh. In sympathy, I was upset.
But. In retrospect. But I mean, I mean, Theodore Animan was an incredibly inventive man whose work I read subsequently, and it is a really sad event. How much it actually had to do.
He was a very reluctant performer, Animan. And the story was that the bullet-catch always had this element of danger and over the course of performing this over a number of hundreds of years. Many magicians had lost their lives. But it's also safe to say that Animan had problems that were not directly related to the bullet-catch at all.
But he really was a remarkable inventor of the kind of illusion these days that are called mentalism or psychic effects or ESP things. And he was very precocious and very, very clever. No, the trick that he did this bullet-catching trick, I think you catch the bullet in your mouth or something, or the illusion is that you do. I think you wrote that 12 magicians were killed in the process of doing that.
Do I have that right? That's a number that's frequently cited. Are there a lot of acts that people have done over the years where they actually lost out and died in the act? Is there a fair number of them?
I mean, what you have to try to deal with is how much of that is hype and how much of that is real. Obviously, if you're the person who was killed by the bullet, you know it's real and that's not good. The most famous man who actually died trying to catch a bullet in his mouth was Chungling Sue on the stage of the Wood Green Empire Theater in England in 1918. And Sue, he's an amazing story for so many reasons.
First of all, he wasn't Chinese. His name was William Ellsworth Robinson. He was an American who was unassisted in some of the great magic shows of the day, the shows of Herman and Keller. And he also wrote a book with one of my favorite titles in all of the literature of magic.
Spirit, Slate writing, and Kindred Phenomena. And Robinson, you know, was great. And at this time, a fellow named Chingling Fu, not Chungling Sue, but Chingling Fu was a real Chinese magician who began to make his reputation in theaters in England, one of the first really successful Eastern performers to appear early in the 20th century. And there was a market suddenly for Oriental performers, for Asian performers.
And Sue, Chungling Sue, William Ellsworth Robinson, realized that if he took on the identity of a Chinaman, might be able to get work. And so he literally went to London, pretended to be Chinese, had his hair shaved, had a cue, tried to make his features more Oriental, and began to perform his act. What's truly extraordinary is that Chingling Fu was, of course, very upset by this, and was a wonderful magician, a really great magician. And he challenged Chungling Sue to an entertainment in which the one who did real Chinese magic would be declared the victor.
And somehow, Chungling Sue won. I mean, the American managed to do a more impressive show. They were both great. So Chungling so kept his persona up for a long time, and called his wife, Sue, he seen, instead of Dot.
And on the stage of this theater, he actually was killed when a bullet was marked and identified and loaded into a rifle, and a rifleman aimed the bullet at Sue. The bullet broke a China plate, which he had in his hand, and then he would then, the illusion would be would catch the bullet in his teeth. The effect is differed on some minor points over the years, but that's a basic explanation of what it was. And on this particular night, Sue was actually killed by the bullet.
The coroner's report called Misadventure, in that wonderfully British way of describing events. Have you ever been hurt in anything you've done? Yeah, people shaking my hands too hard. No, I've had nothing to do with it.
Your semi-famous for not liking children very much. I always wondered about an epitaph. I guess we've got it now. And I think you've been known to even end the performance if there were too many children in the audience.
You're not going to tell me, sorry, about me killing hundreds of them. Oh, that's great. What is it about children when you are performing that is problematic for you? I think it's pretty simple.
It has nothing to do with the children. It has to do with having an art which I take seriously and which has existed since the beginning of time, written off as an entertainment for 15 minutes at a child's birthday party. It's that simple. That's not what it's about.
And it's not what it's about to me. And I don't want any association with it. Which doesn't mean that a child can enjoy a magic show. And it doesn't mean that there aren't people who like to perform magic for children and who do it well.
It just means that I'm not interested in it. What kind of kid were you when you were doing magic? I was never a child. I should mention that you had a magician at your bar.
I showed you, yes. What was his name? Alf Lasso. Yeah.
I think he ran the magic store that you frequent did. But more than ran a magic. Alf Lasso was one of the great magicians who ever lived. I mean, this was actually the, I think I say in Mark's English.
The only kind memory I ever had of my parents was that they told me that flasso always worked the grossingers and the Concord. You know, he worked the Catskills all the time. He was on the Sullivan Show many, many times. This was a great act.
And that he was unavailable to be at the particular, you know, at my bar mitzvah. And they were conning me. And in fact, it hired him. And he came.
So that was actually wonderful. But I mean, here's a man who did often perform for children, who was absolutely brilliant. But then again, a good deal of his act was going on on a level involving on Tondres, which the children could never begin to understand. Right.
So did he make a yarmul disappear? No, but. You know, did you think you'd be able to make a video? You know what I switched the papers and go to a new page here, Terry?
You can make my notes disappear, really, too. How did you end up in the carnival? Oh, I ended up in the carnival. I was in my very poor academic career.
I was at Cornell, and every year, a fair would come to Truman'sburg, which was very close to Ithaca. And a bunch of buddies went out to the Truman'sburg Fair. And there was a magician performing in this 10-1. And he wasn't very good.
And as buddies will do, particularly in those years, like, oh, show him something, Ricky, show him something. Which is terrible. I would never in a million years do this to anyone's act, no matter what level it was on. But this guy picked up on it and started going, yeah, show me something, Ricky, show me.
And I just said, no, no, please continue. I'm very sorry I apologize for this. And he just wouldn't get off me. Show me something, Ricky.
This was a guy with gold, lame hair. And this was, anyway, so the show finished. And even after the show, the guy came out approaching me again. He just wouldn't let this drop.
And at that point, I did take the cards and did something for him. And he was surprised. And he said, if you ever want to come out on the road with me, I would love to have you work in the show. And it was a summer.
And I was attending a bar in a bar and I think I'm doing some side of hand behind the bar. And that was the job description. I'm conducting turtle races, all the usual stuff. I got a call one day from the sky.
I mean, he tracked me down to this bar and said that someone had dropped out of the show and would I come join the carnival, which was then in Cannon-Daguar, one of those little finger-like communities. And that's how it would actually happen. When you started doing magic professionally, I think it was in the 1960s or 70s, and it was during what was in part the LSD or a lot of people in your audience were probably hallucinating while you were performing this sleight of hand stuff. It must have been a pretty strange time in a way to be doing magic.
Well, one of the jobs I was doing it professionally quite young, doing things like that. You were seven, did you did it? In the 60s, I did get a job in the Electric Circus, which was the great psychedelic nightclub in New York in the 60s. And I literally performed sleight of hand in between I can teen a turner and Timothy Leary lecturing on acid.
That is true. And I dare say, most of the people who were watching it were blazed out of their minds. And it was a very peculiar experience. I'm not unhappy that I did it when I cherish the memory.
But they must have just read all of this stuff into what you were doing. Yeah, it was right. I mean, I had people throwing punches at me and grabbing rosary beads and running out of the club. And I mean, it ran through the gamut of emotions.
Sure. And probably it's the experience of my life where I had the least to do with the reaction that was in fact happening. I don't care. We're listening to an interview with sleight of hand artist Ricky J recorded in May at the Herbs Theatre in San Francisco.
Now, you've worked a lot with David Mamet and a bunch of his movies. Your film company, Deceptive Practices, consults to movies on con games and illusions and things like that. How did you get involved in that end of movie making? The first film I ever did, I was asked to do that.
It was a film called The Escape Artist, which was produced by Francis Copola and directed by Caleb Deschanel. And I'm very bad on dates. I mean, I'm going to guess it was sometime around 15 years ago. I just don't know.
It's a very interesting film that got only limited relates with Raul, Julia, and Terry Gar. And it started Griffin O'Neill, who was Ryan O'Neill's son as a magician at a young age. Came from a very interesting novel by a West Coast poet named David Wagner. And they had interviewed a lot of people about being technical consultants.
And they had chosen to go with someone. And on the last day, my literary agent of all people got me an interview for this. And I talked to producers to Doug Claiborne and a couple of the other Caleb, the director. And they liked what I had to say and asked me to come on.
And that turned out to be a defining experience in the sense that I was on that film for almost a year. And did so many things on it. Initially, it was to teach this young teenage boy how to do magic for the film. But it involved the costume consultations and props.
And at one point, even writing this, I mean, I would get a call from Francis and say, would you write an opening for me? Oh, my good lord. I mean, that was an amazing thing to actually have happened. I remember calling up the writer saying, I look, I don't know that I'm so, oh, go ahead.
It's nice that you called. And for a week, the opening that I wrote was in the film. And then one day, it was never discussed again. So I learned a little about film as a writer, which was fun.
I was just thinking of Mamet's line about that. He said, I'm sure you're not the line. He said, when people told me about film and that it was a collaborative effort, I realized I never heard the whole sentence, which is film is a collaborative effort bend over. So obviously, somehow I found Mamet and we've had a lot of unsentance.
I don't know. No, a lot of what you've learned from actually knowing con men. How did you find them? Well, I guess it was that and in the New York Times.
You know exactly. I mean, a magician performs. You know where to find them. What about a con man?
No, I mean, people who are, I don't know how to, I really don't know how to explain that. I mean, you meet people, I want to say with like interests. But I will say that. You meet people with like interests somehow.
I mean, you do. So where? I mean, carnivals? Carnivals?
How can I find a con man? Oh, one will find you. Would I be a good mark? Would I be a good mark?
Do you think? Are there certain people who are good marks? It's a difficult question to answer. I think we're all susceptible to being marks.
And as I said before, we're so callous and so jaded that we trust no one in their lives. I imagine that you are trusting. And so you probably are a good mark. Do you still have to go home and practice?
Yes. What do you practice? Well, this particular show that I'm doing, 52 Assistance, requires there's a level of skill that I have to keep up with. I mean, that's very specific.
I mean, I really, when I'm doing the show, I usually rehearse for a couple of hours in the afternoon and get to the theater a couple of hours early and continue rehearsing just to keep my chops up on the level of material I'm doing in that show. Even though I've done it hundreds of times. It feels good to me, by the way. This is nothing where I'm trying to elicit the sympathy of the audience.
I mean, I like to rehearse. Tell me why you love the magic of flight of hand, of car tracks. Well, I mean, you make it beautiful. I suppose I do.
I mean, I like to see beautiful illusions done as well with lines and tigers and all. But for me, I guess it's the idea of having the direct relationship with those objects, the idea that someone could hand and one a deck of cards of coin, common everyday objects, and that you can create something genuinely interesting with that is something that I always found worked. I mean, I just thought it was really exciting to be able to do that. Isn't there a part of you that instead of just not telling how you do things really wants to say, this is how I do it.
This is how I figured out how to do it. Isn't there a part in the magicians that would really like to kind of brag about how they do what they do instead of hiding it? Absolutely. There's the answer.
Absolutely. There are times where you're crying to tell someone, well, look what I just really want to do that. You absolutely do. But you can't.
But you can't. I think you can't. You go home and tell your friend, your best friend. Who's also a magician?
Oh, yeah, clearly that's the implication, right? Who's also a slightly fan artist. Yeah, this is what happened. Yeah, you really do.
And here's another funny thing. There are a number of effects in the Patiply of Magic, where the method is really better than the effect. Something happens. I wish I could give you a good example for radio.
But I don't think of one at the moment where what's happening behind the scenes is 20 times more interesting than what you're actually saying. And you're dying to say to the audience, boy, if you could just see what any really can. Ricky J, our interview was recorded in May at the Herbs Theatre in San Francisco in an event co-sponsored by City Arts and Lectures of San Francisco and Fresh Air.