Sleight of hand: South Florida has more than its fair share of conventions. Some are just more magical than others - Reporter's Notebook

South Florida CEO, July, 2002 by James Broida

The first incongruity about holding a magic convention at a casino resort is what to do with the card sharks. Manipulating cards is one of the essential art forms of magic, and any magician worth the name can pull aces from the air like a fruit picker pulling cherries from a tree.

"If you go into a casino with a deck of cards, you get banned." says magician Rick Del Vecchio. "They watch us like a hawk." As the chairman of this year's Florida Magician's Association convention, Del Vecchio should know.

Despite that caveat, 450 professional and amateur magicians recently convened at the Miccosukee Resort & Convention Center (which includes a casino) on the edge of the Everglades in Miami-Dade County.

As you might expect, the convention began with fanfare. On Friday afternoon, as delegates arrived from across the state, a young escapist named Dylan Ace was wrapped in a straight jacket and hung from an industrial crane over the resort's parking lot. The event was high drama: While Dylan's assistant set fire to the rope that suspended him, a team of waiting paramedics cranked on their emergency lights and rolled out a stretcher -- just in case. Cries of "Go kid" and "Go Dylan" burst from the crowd. Not to worry. Fifteen seconds later Dylan Ace was free, and the crane lowered him to the ground before the rope burned through.

"Awesome," said one bystander. "He may not be David Blame, but this kid is a real talent."

Talent abounded during the weekend. Everywhere you turned, someone was showing off a new way to trick the mind or the eye. On a couch outside the main exhibition hall, a dapper man demonstrated a new palming technique, sliding a silver dollar over the back of his hand until -- poof -- it vanished. "Let me show you," he said to a man next to him who was smoking a cigarette. In a moment the palmist made the cigarette vanish, only to make it reappear from the side of a table -- still lit.

Inside the exhibition hall, where a dozen magic-trick vendors had set up booths, a woman revealed how she makes cards "fly" from the deck. "I don't know how you do it, but this is my way," she said, turning her hand sideways and revealing her index finger bending the bottom cards of the deck and making each pop into the air, one after the other, catching them with her free hand.

No magic convention would be complete without a stage show, and each night a different half-dozen performers strutted their stuff. There was nothing David Copperfield about the acts, no flaming hoops or disappearing tigers. It was mostly just cards, rings, scarves and wands, the sort of close-up magic that most of the pros use. As Bradenton magician Monty Hahne said, "My best trick is making a living out of this." He performs some 300 shows a year, mostly for school kids and on cruise ships.

Many of the magicians looked the part, sporting goatees and mustaches that would fit a Dr. Diablo billing. But most looked like game show hosts, clean-cut and lacing their prattle with strings of bad jokes. "If you liked that trick, my name is Oscar Munoz," said one performer. "If you didn't like the trick, my name is Osama Bin Laden."

Still, for an outsider, the level of skill seemed extraordinary. There is nothing quite as humbling as a magician who fools you no matter how closely you watch.

Shoot Ogawa, a Japanese magician who did one of the stage acts, was at a booth in the exhibition hall. Uttering the immortal words, "Take a card," he let us pull any from his deck of red playing cards, to be placed face up on the table. A moment later he explained that the deck knew which card it would be. Turning it over, we saw that the card now had a green back, not red. He then showed us that all the cards in the deck were now backed in green.

Before we could react, Ogawa pulled four aces from midair, tossing each on the table. Each one had a different-colored back -- green, yellow, red and blue. And the red-then-green deck which he had been holding -- and which we had been watching continuously -- was spread before us. It was an even mix of red, blue, green and yellow cards.

The only possible response was to mumble the words, "How did you...?" He just smiled and said, "It's magic. And a lot of practice."