Support for this American life comes from headspace, your daily dose of mindfulness in the form of guided meditations in an easy to use app, Headspaces approach can reduce stress, improve sleep and increase your sense of well-being for a free one month trial. Go to Headspace Dotcom slash American. I have no idea what gave me the confidence to start performing magic shows for money when I was 12. I wasn't especially good, hadn't been doing it for long. Not sure I'd ever been to a magic show.

I was a beginner. I was a real beginner. I'd been given one of those magic kits, like you give a little kid that they sell at toy stores.

And then I went to the Baltimore County Public Library on Liberty Road and found some books on magic in the library. And it blew my mind that these books, these incredible secrets were just like sitting there, right there in the shelves, in the open. Anybody could look at them. I could not understand why anybody was in any of the other aisles. I just felt like, oh, they don't know. They don't know these are here.

Before long, I was advertising in the Baltimore Jewish Times. I was booking shows they paid five dollars. I believe the price was in the ad. These are kids birthday parties. My dad would drive me, the kids parents would drive me home. After a few months of this, I got a call from a real magician, like an adult who actually knew what he was doing, who had noticed somebody undercutting his prices. Who are you? He asked.

It wasn't hostile. The magic word in Baltimore was small and everybody knew everybody. So to have somebody new show up like he was just curious and generous. You let me know.

There was a magic store downtown on Charles Street where guys got together, Yogi Magic Mart on Saturday.

The place would be crowded with any magicians who did not have gigs that day and they would smoke and show each other moves. And a guy named Dan Teenie with a huge white beard used to go there. He would give you one of his special coins that was stamped with the words Dante Chinni. He knew Houdini. When you bought a trick, they took you to this special table in the back room and sat you down and taught it to you one on one.

As I remember it, this was done with kindness, with helpful tips, how to tell your hand, how to turn your body, when to pause for effect. It was exciting to be taken seriously by this man sharing these secrets.

I did my act from seventh grade through my sophomore year of high school and so many times it got kind of carved into me.

I could have probably performed it word for word and moved from move up through my 30s. But now I'd have a hard time. I so regularly have dreams that I'm supposed to do the act that when two weeks ago we decided to do this week's radio show about magic, when I learned that David Kestenbaum, one of my co-workers here, was also a kid magician and also played birthday parties for years, starting when he was in fourth grade. At the moment, we sat down in the studio to talk about this like it only took about a minute to be comparing card moves with the four aces.

Yeah, one of them is face up. Right. But you can still go one, two, three, four. For all I know is that you're doing a double shift on that first days, left a triple lift.

Then you got to do an Elmsley countdown. And very quickly, we just started comparing gear appearing.

Kane also disappearing came oh, I had the disappearing cam. He didn't have the appearance came in. Seemed so dangerous.

Doesn't it sort of have a say it don't say it like doesn't it have it.

Yes, it can be. Did the metal. One can be dangerous. I had the plastic one. Yes. Cheaper.

So when I was 12 years old I had business cards. I was a 12 year old with business cards and mind set on it. My name and magical Mister Fire.

Well, my business card had said Master Magician, which is like it seems like it's some level like a black belt level or something, you know, like it. I get like certified master magician or something but yeah. Yeah, it's pretty funny. Like imagine a twelve year old kid walks up to you and says Master Magician would be more amazing if they walked up to you and handed you a card that said Certified Pommer.

So David and I were talking about this stuff and he said this thing that honestly had never crossed my mind ever in my life until he brought it up.

We were talking about whether we were any good. I always thought I was fine.

And then it occurred to me that, like, maybe the reason I got hired wasn't that I wasn't any good.

It was ten years old. And it was probably adorable to have this little magician come over in his three piece suit and do tricks for your kids birthday. I feel like this is so obviously true and I'm finding it so upsetting because what I realize is like I thought I was the one who was in charge of the situation during the magic show, and I was controlling everybody's minds with my mind and my magic tree.

And what you're saying is actually that kind of like the joke was on me, like like I was the entertainment, but not in a way that I understood. It's got to be true.

Right. Like, that's clearly to me as an adult, if you're like, hey, there's this little kid, I'll come over and do magic for your party. I'm like, Don.

Fact is, when I usually think about my years doing magic shows, the biggest feeling I have about it is I feel embarrassment. There's like a cloud of embarrassment that keeps me from staring at it too closely. Like I know I was doing this story about tricks and beginners level sleight of hand in a tuxedo and bow tie and a cape with a bright red whining. And whatever the act, some of it is pretty corny.

But at the same time, I can say for sure, like audiences were engaged, they were engaged from beginning to end, like people were not restless. And I know I got laughs and I thought I was good. Like, it seemed like I was good.

So was I think like after talking to David, I realized, like, I do not have a clear picture of this at all.

And, you know, like there are things about our past that will never fully get into proper perspective. But this this is a completely answerable question. So I called Judy Meltzer, who was a good friend of my mom's when my mom was alive, who lived around the corner from us and who booked me not once but twice for her daughter, Amy's birthdays.

First of all, I mean, you did for quite a time because one time I mean, I wanted to get your magic tricks, the bar mitzvah, which you almost didn't have, as I recall, anyway, and I went to the magic store. Your mother gave me the name of it downtown, the one you frequented and do a very good at it.

Well, this is the thing I was I was trying to get a fix on. It was was a bad. Now, are you kidding me? You think I would of course not. You agree you did a terrific job. You liked it a lot. You think you're doing something different now?

Yes, I am doing something different now. No, you're not.

You're not. Oh, no, I'm sorry. I don't buy that, OK? You think what you want. I'll think what I want. We will wait.

You're saying when you hear me on the radio, it reminds you of my magic act. It reminds me of who. You have always been as far as I'm concerned, you were good, and not only that, you had a spiel, of course, that went with it wasn't that you just kind of did a trick and stuck it out there. Yeah, that like, that's it. And, you know, you had a nice flowing, you know, what he called a pattern.

Pattern. OK, thank you. Yeah, you did. You did that. But I know you are very professional with the outfit and everything. Yeah. I wore a cape. Yes. By the way, you didn't just wear the cape, you used it.

Well, you mean what did I do with the Cape. What are you talking about?

You know, like you would you would flip the side back. And it was a very professional way of wearing of wearing the cape. Yeah. I love that cape. Yeah.

OK, reassuring, but after David and I realized our common conjoined careers as magical, Mr. Fire and Master Magician, we're talking, we realized that so much of our pleasure in magic was just knowing how the tricks were done.

Like the equipment itself was kind of mesmerizing with its false chambers and flaps and secrets that the audience didn't know. Like every trick had a principle behind it. And it was cool to think about the principles. The magician Ricky Jay once said this thing in an interview.

He said that there are many effects in magic where what's going on behind the scenes is actually much more interesting than what the audiences. And as a magician, you sort of want to say, if only you could know what's really happening here and putting the show together.

David and I dove into a bunch of stories with actual master magicians.

And I have to say the most exciting moments in all those stories are about that, about how intricate and psychological and ingenious what they do is. And even as we've been writing and editing the stories like over and over, I've gotten that feeling of excitement about it that I used to get handling the props for practicing the cups and balls. And that's today's show from WBCSD Chicago. It's This American Life. I'm IRA Glass. Stay with us. I climb the oldest trick in the book.

It can take years to come up with the magic trick, several magicians tell me this, which made me wonder, what are they doing all that time?

Like what takes years to make something that's just a couple of minutes long? And this is the part of magic I really knew nothing about from my time as a kid magician. I never invented a trick, didn't even occur to me.

So I wanted to see it, you know, on MTV Cribs, when they would do the house tours and get to the bedrooms, guys would always say, this is where the magic happens. And OK, very different context, but the act of inventing a magic trick like that's actually where the magic happens. And I wanted to finally witness the dark beating heart of where magic comes from. I wanted a magician to explain step by step what takes years.

The one magician who seemed not just interested, but actually kind of eager to come forward and do that was teller of Penn and Teller tellers, the smaller one, the one who never speaks in the act. But of course, in real life, he talks and he liked the idea of explaining how a trick is made.

He once said in a lecture, because if you understand the good magic trick and I mean really understand it right down to the mechanics at the core of its psychology, the magic trick gets better, not worse.

The trick he agreed to explain here on the radio is one that he loves to perform. It performs a lot and he started working on it years ago, looking to invent something new. Penn and Teller live stage show. There was a the fact that he was intrigued by timelike, like there might be something in it that he could adapt for himself. It's not unusual for a magician like Teller to take some secret from a very old trick and repurpose it into something original.

This particular one came from a magic book written in the 1920s and 30s by a guy in Nebraska named David P. Abbott, an amateur magician who made his living as a loan shark who was famous among magicians. Back then, he'd invent these incredible effects and perform them, but only in his living room. He thought that was the best place for magic. Houdini thirsted Kellar. All the big names of magic would come to this guy's little house in Omaha, Nebraska, to see these great shows.

And towards the end of his life, when people would come to his house, he would show he would show you the book that he had. That was all of his magic explained in detail. He died. The book wasn't published. His wife said she would publish it. She died. Two years later, the house was sold. The book had vanished.

It was a legend in a certain corner of the Magic World. This last book with these incredible secrets.

One publisher went on a decades long quest to locate the book, found pieces of it, and then finally, a full manuscript and for legal size looseleaf binders. Forty years later in 1974 and put it into print for the first time. And the trick that attracted Talaat was this golden ball six inches across like a small cannonball. That habit could float around his living room. Those supposed to be one of the most beautiful routines in magic. That's exactly Tower's taste.

I was doing silent, beautiful tricks alone on stage and solo bits like this are in every Penn and Teller stage show. His most famous trick is a pantomime with a rose shadow and a carving knife.

I like stripping things down to the absolute simplicity. And it seems like a ball and a hoop and a person is about as simple as you can get. So he got to work. And I started by taking the original David Pinchbeck book, this long lost book. And I set this book on a music stand in my library at home and I learned this. Let me just pause on this page. So this is a page which has seven photographs. And is that Abbott?

That's David Parbat. Yes. He looks a bit like a white haired fireplug and he's in a black suit and he's moving a hoop over a ball. And there's little arrows indicating which way you turn it this way and that, yes, the level of detail that he provided was astounding. So, I mean, I feel like he's he is speaking directly to me. He tells you how to make the paper moshav it. You make a form of, you know, strips of newspaper X wide.

And let me let me show you some of the some of the beautiful, beautiful floating moves that he created.

Oh, okay. We're standing up and walking across the stage. I maybe I should mention this earlier. Teller and my co-worker, David Kestenbaum and I are doing this interview on the stage with Penn and Teller, do their magic show five nights a week in Las Vegas and a big theater at the Rio Hotel. This is recorded before the pandemic.

And we're going to have to go quite a distance to get the story teller picks up the ball and the thread.

He asked us not to say anything here on the radio about the details of where the thread goes or how exactly it interacts with the ball. But there's still a lot I can say. It's a picture, a guy and a hoop and a ball and a very long thread on a stage.

The early days of this I'm learning moves to make the ball float.

And now I say, like, the ball is floating up the string towards you and then from your left hand to your right hand, you're actually catching the sound of it, which is which is not normally audible to to an audience.

So can I just record can you just do it? Teller gestures, symbolic, like he's summoning up with his hand and it glides along the thread to him, that's the sound you're hearing, it was mind bending is a David, and I can actually see that he's tilting the thread downwards and that's why it slides towards him.

Like we can see the balls on a thread. We can see how it's done. We hear it sliding along. It's pretty. And at the same time, it totally looks like he's this sorcerer who enchanted this inanimate object into a bang. And that is so beautiful, actually, when you see the thread.

Yes, it is. I mean, here's here's one of David PIAB moves that he invented. The ball is floating from hand to hand without really any movement on the part of either of the either of the hands, just by an intricate way that the thread is interlaced in the fingers, then takes the hoop and spend it around the ball in various ways, which makes it look like there can't possibly be a thread there.

But of course we can see the thread. Can I say that's crazy. That's so convincing. Your brain really cannot sort that out. Your brain cannot sort this out. It's visual doubletalk. It's amazing. I'm sitting here and I'm doing it and it's still fooling my brain, which I totally remember from being a kid magician and practicing the thumb palm at the French drop and all the other sleight of hand in front of a mirror. If you do it right, it fools you.

You know, it feels amazing to you. And that's how, you know, the trick is working. So this was Tyler's first step toward inventing his own version of the trek. He spent months mastering David Abbott's moves from 100 years ago and started to figure out what else he could make the ball do on his own. You practice every day.

It hit the ball and went on vacation with him and videotaped himself to see how the moves that oh, I'll show you this with it. Here I am in a cabin in Utah. My pajamas. I just I was just obsessed with it.

He took a trip to Toronto where a magician friend taught him the version of the floating ball routine that he did and then whatever was there, he tried this thing just kind of messing around.

He put the ball on a bench and lifted one end of the bench and then made the ball roll up the bench.

And then later, he had this thought that the football was actually more interesting to watch when it's not floating, when it's just this ball that somehow alive and rolling around, it's weirder and it's more mysterious, is less clear what's propelling it?

It began to cross my mind that no one had ever done a floating ball that didn't float.

And I was I was jubilant. I thought, oh, boy, I got it. I finally got an idea. You know, I finally got an original idea to go with this with this with this method. The next step was to put something together into a routine, like an actual trick as it might be performed. This involved a tremendous amount of invention, making up all kinds of new moves on his own for the floating ball that does not float.

Here's here's a move where I kick it across the stage and it lands softly. I mean, just describe what you doing. So you're kicking the ball and it's going maybe twelve feet out there and then suddenly coming to a stop and just sitting on the floor.

What you would think in real life, if you kick a ball, the ball doesn't stop until it runs out of momentum. So this is suddenly that ball stops, stops dead. Unbelievably difficult. It's it's me using leverage and slack and all sorts of things like that. He spent months inventing these moves at night alone in theater after they finished their shows and all this was preparation to show his partner Penn at this point hadn't seen anything. It was a lot of preparation, all sorts of things, like he'd been practicing with a silver ball like David PIAB its mysterious floating gold orb.

But now he replaced it with a kid's ball, the bounce the size of a kickball because magic is more magical if you do it with real stuff. People know anybody that is chain link fence because he thought, where do you see a kids park at a playground? But he says when he put the chain link fence up on stage, it suddenly felt like the set of Godspell and he ditched it. David, nice tower. Why don't you just show Penn something rough to something with the moves you'd been inventing?

And he said, no, no, no. That's the thing about magic.

You can't look at a half finished piece of magic and know whether it's good or not. It has to be perfect before you can evaluate whether it's good. I mean, magic is a fantastically meticulous form.

You you forgive other forms. A musician misses a note, moves on fine.

You know, he'll come to the conclusion of the piece. Magic is an on off switch. Either it looks like a miracle or it's stupid. So I spent I would guess it was it was probably 11 months or so putting together a routine of moves that I invented with the non floating floating ball. And I showed it to Penn, described the act that he saw, like what was it? I believe that what he saw was very, very artsy.

It was very lonely. It was very sweetly melancholy. I was trying to recreate that sense of solitude in a in a theater late at night.

He sat way back in the theater, way towards the back, so that he could get a wide stage view of it. I finished it and he quietly got up and left the theater and I thought, hmm, that's probably not a good sign. So I went back to his dressing room and we talked for a while.

I remember being in the dressing room and being really, really, really wicked uncomfortable. This, of course, is tell our stage partner, Penn Jillette. There was nothing about it that grabbed me. I thought it was technically good as a juggling bit. I thought it was OK.

Juggling he means the mechanics of moving the ball around.

I was the first time we really had something that outside of. Outside of the overlap to get into the Penn and Teller show, it has to be an idea that appeals to both Penn and me. And he said and to his credit, he said that he thought it was way too Cirque de Soleil. It was way to sort of artsy, pretentious. I remember Teller getting a little bit mad at me.

Because I said, what's the idea behind this? And he was very offended. He was like, well, the idea is the trick, you know, and I think it hadn't clicked with him because it lacked an essential dramatic idea.

Of course, to me, I was I was all wrapped up in the idea that it was a floating wall that wasn't floating, which isn't a very good idea. I mean, that's not an idea that communicates to an audience that I say Starbucks.

They talked about what idea might work with the trick.

Penn suggested presenting it as a kind of history piece, an old classic with period music, the kind of thing they would do in a magic history conference delegate excited about that.

He them later adding to the idea like they tell the audience he was using a method from 100 years ago that electronic technology and no help from Off-stage. Imagining that version of the chicken running back quote from reading this have lost a little faith in the idea, I guess we can try this, but it doesn't seem to bring another level in.

Maybe we just do it the way you wanted and not look for more here. I'm sure people like it fine. I don't know, it seems to make a lot of what I didn't like, maybe worse, I know I don't have to like every bit in the show, that's for sure. Like, that seemed wrong for Penn to settle. He got back to work, solve the problem and history making this trick turned from just the mechanics of moving a ball around on a thread to actually thinking through what tells a story, what's engaging, what's fun to watch, what's satisfying.

I realized one of the things that was missing from the trick.

He says any magic trick is better if there's a reason the magic happens.

So, for instance, if you put, let's say, a coin into your hand, close your hand, snap your fingers, open it and the coin is gone. There's not much of an impact to that. And the reason for that is that the action seems arbitrary, that there doesn't seem to be a cause that makes that event happen. Like like why would a coin disappear? Yes. If you put the same coin in your hand, close your hand and even do just this.

Even just say take out as a match, light the match, pass it around your hand and act with a sudden jolt as though something has happened inside your head where the coin melted away and you've been burnt and you open your hand. And there's no coin, though, that level of acting, that level of causality that suggests that somehow the fire of a match could make a coin melt away suddenly adds a dimension to it. That I think is pretty crucial.

So it gives it a story.

It gives it a little bit of a story. It gives it it gives it emotion. And I realized that I was doing all of this stuff with nothing causing it. There was no cause. Why is the ball moving around if the ball is just moving around? It was just arbitrary movement.

What Hitler's collaborators, the veteran magician named Johnny Thompson, gave him a suggestion that changed everything. Now he said you got to treat the ball like a trained dog.

That would give a reason for its movement logic cause to tried it.

I thought, well, you know, what is it typically a trained dog to jump through a hoop? So a trained dog is not always going to do what it wants, what you want it to do. All right. Hold up the hoop. The dog wouldn't respond, I'd call the dog and instead of jumping through the hoop, it would come over and land on the rim of the hoop. I sit down and ignore it. What does a dog do when you ignore it?

Well, it very often comes to you and here's what's happening. What's happening is I'm realizing that the plot of this is the dog trainer is getting the dog to jump through a hoop. That becomes the plot. That becomes a little bit of a story. Now, I had a plot and a story teller did something else at this stage that's so essential and basic to the kind of drama that particularly happens in a magic show. One of the things that you do as a magician is you try to you try to put yourself in the position of the audience at every moment and you say, what would I be thinking at this moment?

And you try to manipulate that. And one of the ways you do that is by giving the audience a little chance to figure something out and then take it away from them. And so he does that with this routine. Reimagines it, the bus starts on the bench, always in contact with the bench, so the audience, I think the ball is controlled by the bench and then he gets the ball off the bench, it sticks to his finger and floats in the air.

So they might conclude that it's his finger that controls the ball. And then it drops to the floor away from his finger, so each time you think of something, I give you the chance to think of that, and then I take it away from you one thing after the other. It takes a lot of work. He finishes the new routine, shows it to his partner, Penn. Who hates it, truly, truly hates it. Yes, he makes it further away from my taste at least, that it was an abstract moving thing.

It's closer to my taste. Once it becomes something like a dog, it's moved very far out of my taste.

Because you hate an animated object. Why do I hate? I hate. I hate anthropomorphism. I don't like relationships with animals or inanimate objects at all, which is basically what this is.

Yeah, but see, the thing is, where is my argument, where is this argument.

Like what is he supposed to say. This is a delicate conversation right here. These two men who respect each other but don't socialize or hang out together.

You've been arguing, they say, constantly and fiercely but productively for over 40 years.

And Penn knows how much work Tower has put into this track and how much you enjoy performing it every night.

I'm not saying this outright, but it's implicit. This is beautiful. This is mystifying. This is entertaining. People will love it.

It's really important to me. All those five things are true. So it's very, very uncomfortable, uncomfortable because Penn agrees it's a great trick, totally works, he just doesn't like it. It doesn't feel like their show to him this red ball, that's also a disobedient puppy. That's like the kind of idea you might see in a cartoon and they try to build the show around the principle that there should be nothing in the show that feels even vaguely familiar to the audience, nothing you can imagine seeing in anybody else's work.

Japan doesn't say yes, but didn't say no either, he says, to tell her to be in the show, it still needs one more idea to really make it ours. And out of respect for each other, they try to come up with that idea and I don't know which one of us brought it up, I think I'm the one who said, what if we actually said? I said, you know, when Mike Close and Johnny Thompson came and watched me do this trick, these two other magicians they admire, they knew there was a thread there.

And because they knew there was a thread there, they were more baffled than an audience that could imagine that there was this was being done with a little gyroscope inside the inside the ball. So I said, what if we say right out at the top, here's a trick that's done with a piece of thread and a special backdrop, then said, I think all you need is now here's a trick that's done with a piece of thread. That gives them so much, it brings them over onto our side and suddenly this now had an idea and the idea was bigger than the little plot with a little ball.

It was bigger than all the little magic tricks it was that you can state the actual method of a magic trick clearly at the beginning of it.

And it can still fool the hell out of people that that by knowing this extra piece of information, the trick becomes better. In other words, if the audience in the theater, the same feeling that David and I had standing on stage, seeing the thread and still feeling amazed that the audience can see the thread, but they know it's there somewhere, Pended Gabi, a girl for sudden change in lighting the boom, would reveal the thread to the audience fully visible.

But in the end, this solution just telling them about the thread was enough for him. And 18 months after Tyler picked up David P.. Abbott's book to practice for the first time, he and Penn added the ball to their show is not the longest they've ever worked on a trick. Not even close. They told me about one that took him six years. Making anything good takes time.

There's a there's a quote that your partner of 40 years, Penneshaw, had said about you. It's kind of mean there's no better partner than tell her he's not the smartest, most creative person I've ever been around, but he's the hardest working. He will not give up. You can put him on a single task in the middle of it, hit him with a baseball bat square in the face and he goes right back to the task.

Well, I'm sure he's talking directly about this bit. And if that is true, it is true.

I have a certain dog with a slipper quality about me, especially I.

I do trust my gut, this trick that we do in the show is not the trick that I thought we were going to do. But it is the trick that was calling out to me, you know. Taylor teared up as he said this, I told his partner, Pam, yeah, he does, he does get choked up about it. There's stuff I get choked up about, too. It's not it.

They are very different people, Penn and Teller, even the way they tell the story tellers, telling the story has a happy ending.

They added the extra idea of compromise was reached. The partnership worked when Penthouse, the story, the compromise was little deeper. I think that Teller does a beautiful job and the audience loves it. And I kind of. Zone out. It doesn't feel like the whole bit just snaps into what it should be. You know, it doesn't feel me now, even now or, you know, even now, you're not into that trick. No, maybe telling me I know that.

But I mean, Teller may have noticed that every show order we come up with at some point, I suggest we have a show without the Red Bull. You might notice that. I don't know if I noticed. You know, it is a pattern that shows up.

But can I say again, really good trick. It is a beautiful job.

He worked really hard and the audience loves it. Teller told me, of course he knew. The answer to that is that you don't work together so long, he said, without knowing something like that. Interestingly, after five years of performing this trick, they changed the ending Tadmor of what Penn wanted, which is to underline the fact that it's done with the threat a little more. You can see this version of the trick online. There's a video from Penn and Teller TV show for us.

We have a link at our website. Here's why they added to finally finish the trick for good. Over six years after Teller first started practicing with Abbott's book, at the end of the routine, Penn walks out on stage, grabs the thread from Teller and then dangles the ball from the thread. Penn takes an oversized scissors, cuts the thread, the ball drops to the ground and Penn kicks the ball across the stage. Looks mad, is acting, of course, but into that ball with gusto.

Coming up, making a very, very big object, an object too big to fit in a building, making it disappear. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

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Better help Dotcom LongTail. That's better help dotcom to sell. It's this American Life miracle. Today's program, The Magic Show, my co-worker David Kestenbaum and I, both of us former kid magicians, return to magic as adults and it all looks very different.

Today Show was first broadcast in 2017.

We have arrived at Act two of our program, Back to the Lady Vanishes.

So I'm putting together this show. David became obsessed with this one trick that he had seen back when he was a teenager. The Guinness Book of World Records listed as the largest illusion ever staged.

David wanted to know what it was like to be on the other side of that one, like what it was like to be the magician again.

The story was made pre coronavirus. Here's David. This is a trick I loved when I was a kid, I'd kind of forgotten about it. And then one night I was home recently watching the TV show The Americans, the shows about this family living in the U.S. in the 1980s. The parents are undercover Russian spies because it's set in the 1980s.

These big historic moments pop up. President Reagan getting shot, Iran-Contra. But then this one episode, it opens with this mom.

This is the Statue of Liberty, David Copperfield making a Statue of Liberty disappear on TV. Every single person I know would be watching this.

Oh, Dad, come on. He's about to do it. I remember this exact moment happening in my house. I was 13 years old, about the same age as those kids. And as a kid magician, I think I'd circled the time and channel and the TV guide that was our family system for reserving television. When I've tried to relive this amazing moment in American history with other people, though, I get mostly blank stares.

But I figured someone involved with the Americans must have been a nerd like me because there's like two minutes of the show where the family is just watching the trick on television and.

So I reached out and, yeah, one of the producers of the Americans, Joel Fields, was just like me. I was in my parent's wood paneled den in Toronto, Canada, on their brown corduroy couch.

It's extremely possible I brought some friends just like me in one other way to I was a magician as a kid, the whole thing hanging out at the local magic shop. His colleague Joe Weisberg was there, also the creator of the Americans. Joe kept ripping us through the interview.

Where were you when you watch the David Copperfield special, not watching the David Copperfield special? We're even aware that had happened. I would have to say no.

For those of you who are not following the national magic scene in the 1980s, and I realize now there are many of you.

David Copperfield is one of two truly big name illusionists. At the time, it felt like he was in a kind of battle with the other one. Doug Henning both had TV specials on separate networks. Copperfield was handsome. clean-Cut Henning was the hippy wearing tie dye with long hair and teeth that hadn't seen braces. I was squarely Team Copperfield, my boss, IRA Glass.

I learned while we were editing the story 1000 percent Team Henning loved Hennings goofy sense of wonder, which I hated Copperfield.

My man seemed driven, intent on proving that he was the best in the world, going bigger every time in his previous TV special, he made an airplane disappear. Joe was somehow unaware of this, too.

Was the airplane on the ground or in the sky? No. Is on the ground.

Yeah, well, that's not you know, it was actually people stood around this airplane in a ring holding hands and it just vanished. The Statue of Liberty even more amazing. I watched it again with Joe and Joel. And here I'll just narrate for you. Imagine it's 1983.

You're in the family living room on some couch tonight, the illusion of ascension. David Copperfield will attempt to make the Statue of Liberty disappear, the TV special opens with helicopter footage of the statue. Illusion happens at night, so it's all lit up. We fly up by the crown, the torch and then cut to the man himself. David Copperfield, looking like a teen heartthrob, big dark eyes, some sort of silvery rock star jacket.

And this, of course, didn't register with me as a middle school kid, but he's young to be taking on something so ambitious, 26 years old. He gives this little speech. Good evening, I'm David Cohen. And tonight, we're here on Liberty. People come to this island by boat and I've made the trip quite frequently during this past year, getting ready for tonight. A couple of weeks ago when I was on the boat, a young sightseer, about seven years old, came up to me and said, Are you David?

He said he saw me make a car disappear. And then he said he saw me make the jet plane disappear.

I thanked him and I watched as he looked up at the Statue of Liberty. Then at me and back to the statue and back to me. Finally, he looked me right in the eye and said, are you thinking what I think you're thinking? That's what I was thinking, all right.

I somehow doubt it happened exactly like that. But whatever.

Finally, it's time David's magic is performed with absolutely no camera tricks. The illusion you are watching at home is exactly the way he is doing it. Now, Copperfield has an audience sitting right there on Liberty Island at the foot of the statue. Everyone is sitting on the stage outdoors, looking up at the huge Statue of Liberty, which is about 200 feet away.

There are spotlights on it and a helicopter circling overhead. Our view is the same as the audience. We're just behind them looking up at the statue. Two on either side of the stage are two big scaffolding towers kind of framing the shot. If a view of the statue between what happens next is one continuous camera shot, no visible at it's a giant curtain is hoisted up, suspended between those two scaffolding towers.

You can't see the statue now, but it has to be there right behind the curtain. Then Copperfield puts his left hand to his temple, closes his eyes.

This is a signature Copperfield move familiar to me.

Even now, it's as if he's doing it with his mind. A few seconds past, the curtain drops. The spotlights are the helicopter still circling, but now circling nothing, just empty space. The camera cuts to reactions from the audience. Everyone seems astonished. There's one guy wearing a priest's collar.

I was amazed. I don't see who was there and it's not there anymore. Do you have any ideas where it went? I have no idea. No idea.

And then an older woman. I have never seen a Statue of Liberty disappear the way this one did. Copperfield, I think, in an attempt to land some larger meaning, makes a speech about immigrants and how we shouldn't take our liberty for granted.

Then he makes the statue reappear. Even Joe Weisberg, the non magic fan, when he finally watched it as an adult, he was moved for Joel and me as kid magicians. We tried to figure out how he did it. Did you have any theories?

I had I did not have a good theory. And as somebody who knew a lot of magic gimmicks, I was pretty dumbfounded.

Did did your friend say, tell me how he did it? I'm sure they did. And I think I would have I would like to believe that I told them I didn't know. I'm not proud of this. But when kids asked me how Copperfield did it, I have a pretty clear memory of saying something like, sorry, I can't tell you which was true. I couldn't.

Sometimes it is not so fun to learn how a trick is done.

It's all double lifts and hidden compartments. And when you learn the secret, it can be kind of a letdown. But there are those times when the secret to the trick is cooler than the trick itself, the sheer ingenuity and genius of it.

And so I'm going to talk now about how this trick might have been done. We thought a lot about whether to put this on the radio. But the truth is you are all a simple Google search away from what I'm about to tell you.

That is one of the weird things about magic today.

Over 30 years later, the Internet exists, the whole world of explanations and pretty good instructional videos for aspiring magicians.

But if you'd rather not go down this road with me, you can skip ahead or stop listening for about ten minutes. I totally respect that. I should also say we did reach out to David Copperfield and we made a pitch which was basically this may be your greatest hit. It's been 34 years now. Everyone is going to be fooled by this trick has already been fooled. You'll never perform it again. Nobody's going to perform it again.

We're not hurting the livelihood of any magician by revealing the secret. Why not come on the show and talk about what it was like to be on the other side?

Copperfield was completely gracious, but he said it wasn't his job to talk about how the tricks are done. And he said something else. He said, To protect the secrets of his tricks, he's hired people to put fake explanations online to throw the curious off the track. Which, of course, makes the whole thing even more interesting. So here is the explanation that is on the Internet and also in one book written by a non magician, instead of moving the statue, Copperfield moved the audience.

The entire audience rotated them.

Actually, they were sitting unknowingly on a giant rotating platform. Think a huge, lazy Susan.

So here's how it would have worked, the curtain gets hoisted up between the two towers, blocking the statue from view, and while it's up the platform with the entire audience on it and the giant scaffolding towers and the curtain, the whole thing rotates until it's facing away from the statue so that when the curtain falls, the audience is looking at it. Nothing or I think to be precise, they're looking at it part of the New Jersey coastline.

It's such a beautiful secret, smart and simple and big. There is another part of the secret, which is even cooler, when I first heard there might have been a rotating platform.

I wondered what was to stop the audience members from just turning their heads and seeing the statue. After all, it should have been just off to one side.

The answer, it's hidden in what, in retrospect, is the only possible place behind one of the scaffolding towers used to hold the curtain up. The scaffolding tower is tiny compared to the statue, but it's close enough to the audience that would the platform rotated to just the right position.

The tower blocks the statue from view. Watching the TV special, again, knowing this made it even more impressive, I kept thinking how exciting and nerve wracking it must have been to be Copperfield in that moment.

To pull this off, the rotation would have had to been fast enough that it didn't seem to take too long, but not so fast that someone would notice. And super smooth, here's Joel Fields, former kid magician, first of all, how could the people there not have noticed such high stakes? Right. It's ballsy to put these people on a thing and like, hope that really no one's going to notice.

It's a wildly gutsy trick.

Well, what could it have not worked? What could have gone wrong?

One or more people could have said, hey, this platform's rotating.

Someone could have had a compass. The more I thought about this, the more questions I had was this really how it was done? Could you get away with something like that?

Maybe this was a fake explanation planted by David Copperfield, a scaffolding tower to hide some deeper secret.

I figured the best thing would be to track down some of the audience members who were there at the foot of the Statue of Liberty.

But remember, this happened in 1983. And in any case, none of the audience members are named.

I didn't see any easy way to track them down, but as I was watching and watching the video of the trick, I found one shot where someone's name was revealed, someone I could try to contact.

It comes in the lead up where Copperfield is in the office of the Park Service official for the Statue of Liberty. It's just a quick cutaway where he's explaining that he had to get permission to make the statue disappear.

But if you freeze frame on that part, you can just make out on the man's desk a nameplate, David L. Moffitt. I had no idea that this guy was still alive, this was, after all, 34 years ago, but I started searching for a David L. Elmsford and I found one in Virginia.

But with a previous residence of Liberty Island High, I got on a plane to fly down there.

You recognized automatically my driveway to sit down and relax for 10 years.

If you wanted to do anything with the Statue of Liberty, you had to go through David Elmsford. You lived on the little island with his family.

The Park Service has a house there. The statue is right outside his window.

He felt like it was his job to protect her, was almost a member of the family when a deodorant maker tried to use her in an ad, maybe because she has her arm up. David Moffett fought back on a furniture company, wanted to hang a couch from her and have someone sit in the couch.

He vetoed it. And when David Copperfield requested permission to make her disappear, he said no.

I personally felt that was an inappropriate use of such a sacred icon. And I wrote back a rejection to the request. And I thought that probably was the end of it, but a couple of weeks later, Moffa gets a letter in the mail from the director of the National Park Service giving Copperfield permission. Copperfield had gone over his head.

He had connections in the White House. Copperfield's team did confirm this. They said he got permission directly from Ronald Reagan, put it mildly.

I was a little bit taken back. A few days later, I walked in an office in there.

David Copperfield standing up there, very handsome, nice looking guy, well dressed. Copperfield apologized for getting him overruled. Moffitt says Copperfield seems sincere, like a nice guy. I signed a permit and then he says, I would like for you to sign a waiver that you will not disclose how I make the statue disappear. And I said, no, I won't do that. I said I would never do anything that would limit my freedom of speech. Hard to argue with that way or at the foot of the Statue of Liberty.

Moffitt was there during the filming and he saw how the trick was done. He says he kept his mouth shut for the last three decades, only told family and a few friends. But he confirmed for me the explanation on the Internet. That is the real explanation he even demonstrated for me.

We got the lazy Susan that I used for pottery, that thing. Could you get that or I'll get it.

He had a miniature Statue of Liberty.

Of course, that stage starts turning and it goes maybe 25 or 30 degrees to the right.

During the filming, Moffitt was standing just off to the side of the platform. I found another guy who was there and who confirmed the basic mechanics of how the trick was done.

But talking to him made me wonder if there might be a whole other level of deception to the trick. His name is Al Cerrillo. His name was in the credits for the show, he flew a helicopter in the Vietnam War and now for TV and movies, so many The Avengers, Spiderman, Muppets take Manhattan. The one I want to ask you about was in the 1980s. It would be probably TURC 182 or one of those movies, it was in 1983, not Nighthawks, it involved the Statue of Liberty, a working girl, you know, when David Copperfield made the statue of David Copperfield.

Yeah, yeah. That was a pretty big deal, actually.

He told me the helicopter, his job was to fly from position to position B while the curtain was blocking the view basically from above the statue to above a designated empty spot, which was rigged with duplicate spotlights.

If you think about it, the helicopter and the lights are the fixed points in the trick, things that make the audience think they're looking at the same spot.

I didn't think he was going to be able to pull it off. How come? Like, what were you worried about happening?

You know, the stage would you'd feel the stage moving or whatever. They spent a lot of money, evidently, on some kind of bearings in the stage, you know, on the bottom so that you wouldn't feel it. It got delayed a couple of times because, you know, it wasn't working. Right. You know, couldn't get it to work the way he wanted, which put this unpleasant thought in my head.

Was the audience really fooled by this or were they may be in on it the whole time?

Yes. Is that right? Yeah, that's yes. Some of the people in the audience were states that knew what was going to happen.

Oh, not everybody. I don't think so. Do you know? No, I don't know about that part of it, you know, we never got into that. I never asked him. He never mentioned it.

You know, I asked David Ellman at the Park Service guy was the audience in on it? He answered with a story. This happened just after they finished shooting.

And everybody is slapping everybody on the on the back. And everybody I had it all.

And I said something to one of the so-called audience, how did you end up here?

And she said, oh, I was paid for this and I was paid to come here.

Yeah. And that was kind of the end of the conversation.

I was I didn't that's not well, I wasn't investigating.

I was just curious where these people came from, especially when they were so amazed that it was decent that it had disappeared because they felt the stage and they couldn't help but feel the stage moving. Do you think they were all actors?

I don't know if they were actors or wannabe, I don't know. I know that one of them was paid to be there.

Murfitt went back over this in his memory because he wanted to be accurate. He later told us he thinks it was one of his employees who talked to the woman. To be fair, it's been over 30 years. But this thought that the audience might have been in on it, it made me incredibly sad. It felt like cheating. If all those people going, wow, they were paid to go well, they weren't fooled. That's not magic.

That's like we're watching a play about magic. I told the Americans producers, Joe and Joel about this, Joe, the former kid magician, didn't see it the way I did at all. It means he bought off the whole audience.

No, no, no, it doesn't. It might mean that it doesn't. Let's say he no, the audience was us.

The television audience is the audience. He promised to make the Statue of Liberty disappear with no camera tricks. He made the Statue of Liberty disappear with no camera tricks. It's pretty dramatic. And it was moving.

I think it's a little troubling, if true after. I honestly didn't know what to believe. I watched the TV special again and again, and some of the audience members started to look like actors, at least in moments like just after the curtain drops and the statue is gone. This one guy leans over to the woman next to him and points in this kind of hokey way. Then there's the fact that one of the audience members is in a preschooler.

Really, you happen to get a priest in the audience and a priest dressed that way when they go out at night.

Finally, I got a tip, I was at this magic show talking to these two people, one of them I'll call a former high ranking official in the magic establishment.

They knew someone who had been there on Liberty Island during the filming of the show and would know the truth. I called the person up and he agreed to talk.

My name is Ed Alonzo. I'm known as the misfit of Magic. And maybe you remember me as Max, the owner of the diner on Saved by the Bell.

It was also the guy who made that curtain go up and down in front of the Statue of Liberty. Actually, there were two guys who was a big curtain. It was 18 years old at the time, a young magician. So he stayed overnight at David Copperfield parents house in New Jersey.

Before the shoot, I told them I'd heard the audience might have been in on it. I told them what the Park Service guy had told me, that an audience member had said she had been paid to be there.

Really. So I'm totally surprised it is possible that maybe some of the people were paid to be there only because they couldn't get enough regular people with the amount of tickets that they gave out.

Sometimes you do use paid extras in an audience, he says. They show up on time and you can tell them the dress nicely.

But even if they were paid people, they would have not have known how the trick was done. There was no reason for for anyone to know ahead of time.

Copperfield's team, by the way, says no audience members were paid. They say the woman who claims she was paid to be there must have been on the production staff. And it says an enormous amount of work was done to make sure the trick would fool people. It didn't want to talk about or confirm the mechanics of the trick, but he said they did a whole dry run beforehand out in Los Angeles. The idea to make the Statue of Liberty disappear came from an illusion designer named Jim Steinmeyer.

Copperfield's team, with the help of a guy named Don Wayne, added all kinds of improvements and built the stage as a test. They used it to make the moon disappear. They set the stage up basically in this parking lot.

Yeah, we were in a parking lot because this the stage was enormous. David thought that, you know, we have to do kind of a demonstration to work out the bugs before we haul this thing to New York.

A bunch of top magicians in L.A. sat on the stage. Copperfield made the moon disappear and everyone gave notes, tweaks to make it better so you could fool a real audience. Ed says the night of the filming at the Statue of Liberty, it was clear to him that the people in the audience were fooled. I asked him why. In a couple of shots, the audience seemed a little fake to me. He had a pretty good explanation, which is that they filmed the trick multiple times.

Copperfield's team officially denies this.

Ed says.

It's so, though I think that maybe after we did just about the third or fourth time, some of the people that were sitting on this platform may have had an idea as to what was going on.

I grilled Ed for an hour about this. And for what it's worth, I believe him when he says the audience was not in on it.

Though I do have this tiny sliver of doubt, it was I have to say, I kind of enjoyed the feeling of David Copperfield, told us he was disappointed that we wanted to do our story on a trick that's over 30 years old.

He said he had better stuff now, stuff he'd just invented that he's totally jazzed about. You need to see it, he said. So IRA and I went to a show in Las Vegas.

Copperfield is 60 years old now and doing two or three shows a day. That's just how he rolls. The other year he did over 600 performances. The show is not all to my taste, but it was amazing. The work of an obsessive person driven to keep creating new things.

At one point, the lights went out just for a brief moment, and when they came back on, an enormous flying saucer had appeared right over our heads. I mean, huge. It took up a good part of the theater and it moved like the Millennium Falcon or something hovering and banking the way you imagine flying saucers moving when you were a kid.

It was this moment of just sheer surprise and delight and joy. I don't care how he did it. David Kestenbaum, my program was produced today by David Kestenbaum and me, people who put together today's program, including activist Yancoal Whitney Dangerfield, Karen Duff and Stephanie Foo, kind of Jaffey Walt, Miki Meek, Jonathan menuBar, Christopher Satava, Matt Tierney, Nancy Updike, Julie Whitaker and Diane Wew. Senior producer for today's program is Brian Reid, managing editor for today's show.

Susan Burton, additional production up on this rerun by Nora Gill and Stone Nelson. Special thanks. Today to Sarah Seth and Adam Gorian, to Danny Miller and to magician Neil Patrick Harris, Penn and Teller, who you heard at the beginning of the show, have a Christmas special that airs December 16th.

And a new season of their incredibly good natured TV show for us starts in January. Their colleague, Johnny Thompson, who we mentioned in that story, died last year. Our website, This American Life Dog, where if you go this week, we have something special. You can see a few pages of David P. Abbott's Book of Magic with a view of his very meticulous instructional photos of the floating bar, which I have to say it's really something to see.

So you can see embarrassing photos of me in a cape and David in a suit doing magic tricks when we were little. This American life is delivered to public radio stations by Pyrex, the Public Radio Exchange. Support for this American life comes from Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, family owned, operated and argued over since 1980. Proud supporter of independent thought, whether that's online, over the air or in a can or bottle more at Sierra Nevada dotcom. Thanks as always.

The program's cofounder, Mr Tony Malatya. You know, I asked him, how is it possible that you only paid 11 percent in federal taxes last year?

It's it's me using leverage and slack and all sorts of things, like I'm IRA Glass back next week with more stories of this American life.

Next week on This American Life, when I was 25 years old, this is how I sounded on the radio. And now true to life adventure stories, that is not good, which is normal for 25.

Next week on our show to kind of commemorate the 25th year, this American life's on the air. We have stories of 25 year olds making their way in the world. That's next week on the podcast on your local public radio station.