We Went to the Magic Castle

call it a restaurant review

My mother is a good judge of scarves. For over three decades she performed in a magic show¹; at its outset, she was one of the “FOAs”—the four original assistants. She knows scarves, knows how to pull one through a hand do demonstrate its simplicity, its honesty. Nothing to see here. There were plenty of scarves in our show: scarves that hid things, scarves that disappeared, scarves that danced on their own accord, scarves used as decoration or distraction. We preferred—our director preferred—silk scarves², which had to be kept free of wrinkles and snags. I never knew this as a child, of course; I only knew its result. But my mother knew the difference between an acceptable and unacceptable scarf.

In the basement of the Magic Castle, two weeks ago, she scoffed at some polyester thing a man was using to hide a few coins. He can’t even get someone to iron his scarves? she whispered, leaning over to me, and I immediately inherited her disgust. Sure, this was just sleight of hand in a nearly-hidden room, but couldn’t he bring a little self-respect to the table? I thought about how Cesareo, our master magician and director, an imperious man long dead, would have responded to a scarf so garish and wrinkly. A roar that could fill this entire building, this old mansion set into the feet of the Hollywood Hills. I gave a little laugh. We don’t perform magic anymore—it’s been over a decade for my mother, nearly two decades for me—but I think we both still take a bit of pride in our affiliation with the craft, or at least with its more elevated performers. We have enough experience to judge comfortably.