TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Several years ago, while looking for a film or a show to watch, I came across Derek DelGaudio’s one-man show, In & Of Itself. It wasn’t a magic show, or stand-up comedy, or straightforward storytelling. There weren’t card tricks, or straightjackets or shackles to escape from, or doves, or impossibly long handkerchiefs pulled from sleeves. No one was sawed in half.

I don’t want to say too much about that show, or about DelGaudio’s memoir, AMORALMAN, because I want you to watch and read for yourself. Both moved me deeply, and in ways I find hard to articulate. Derek DelGaudio has called the one-man show a “theatrical existential crisis” as opposed to a mere magic show, and I think that’s why I loved it so much. It’s singular. I’d never seen anything like it, and I know I never will.

Both the show and the book recount important pieces of DelGaudio’s childhood. He was an outsider as a child, raised by a single mom. You might think perhaps this is what drew him toward magic — something he could practice on his own. But it’s even deeper than that: In his work, DelGaudio also talks about his mother coming out as a lesbian in a conservative small town when he was six years old. Magic, he said, was a way to protect himself from homophobic bullies.

It is a powerful thing, to have your own thing. To play a sport or an instrument, to have a talent or an activity that helps you define yourself at a time in your life when you feel undefined, when you could use some help moving through the word with more clarity, more inner strength, more definition.

For me, and maybe for some of you listening, that was poetry. Being an introvert as a child is certainly what drew me to reading books and eventually writing poems of my own.

Today’s poem reminds me of the trick that poetry performs, time after time. We can vanish into a poem and emerge whole, but changed. It’s magic.

The Magicians at Work
by Nicky Beer

          After Jim Steinmeyer’s book “Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians 
         Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear”

Over the years they hunted,
the wayward apprentice watchmakers, 
the disappointing sons who transformed
their surnames, hunted over acres
of hinges, cogs, calluses, hidden whiskey,
mustaches a breath from feral,
poured an ocean of fortune
into fabrications of brass and iron,
spent entire seasons strumming
massive harps of wire into perfect
calibrations of invisibility,
prayed to the gods of adjustable mirrors,
cursed the gods of temperamental gaslights,
broke the legs of imitators and thieves,
chewed holes in each other’s pockets, 
harnessed nightmares of giant silver hoops
making endless passes over the bodies
of the dead, hoisted high a cenotaph
for hundreds of sacrificed rabbits,
breathed miles of delicate thread
into the lost labyrinths of their lungs,
all to make a woman float
to make a woman float
and none of them ever thought
of simply asking her.

"The Magicians at Work" by Nicky Beer from REAL PHONIES AND GENUINE FAKES © 2022 Nicky Beer. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Milkweed Editions.