Ricky Jay

And, you know, that historical approach to the routine has real cachet with the audience.

I found, even though magicians, many magicians use this, of course, Ricky Jay very famously and Vernon himself.

I find with real world audiences that magic really works.

One of the oldest mysteries in all of magic.

But what happened was...

I mean, when you think of the people that were on the Secret Cabaret, and you can YouTube this, if you go on YouTube, type in Secret Cabaret Simon Drake, the sort of people that were on his show as guests on the show were Max Maven, David Burglass, Ricky Jay, some of the most fantastic people.

Legendary figures in

magic, right?

But it's crazy.

Ricky Jay says...

Ricky Jay is a famous card magician.

And he would say, the magician is an honest liar.

It's the most noble of trades.

It is indeed a performance venue, but it is also a magician's club and members must go through an application process.

Famous members include Penn and Teller, David Blaine, Lance Burton, Ricky Jay, Neil Patrick Harris, who entered through the Academy's Junior Society and has actually served as the president of the Academy, Ed Alonzo from Saved by the Bell, Harry Anderson from Night Court, Steve Martin, who worked for three years full-time at Disneyland's Merlin's Magic Shop in Fantasyland as a teenager, We have Jacqueline Smith's real-life poodle Albert is back and makes an appearance early in this episode.

And one more, if you can stand it, at the beginning of the episode, Sabrina meets an old colleague from her LAPD days, just like Kelly in Angel Baby.

Lieutenant Alex Summers, played by Wyatt Johnson.

So you can see a show that either you never got the chance to see or one that you enjoyed so much you would love to see it again.

Okay, so I would have loved to have seen either one of Ricky Jay's shows.

I think it was Ricky Jay on Stem and 52 Assistants.

I think they were the two that I...

most recognized um but yeah i'd like to see see that um obviously i'm never going to have that chance again i don't think they they were ever recorded so it's not something that's likely to pop up anywhere um but yeah i think i would probably have liked to have seen that Ricky J was actually my other choice if I didn't go for Max Moven as my person to spend company with.

Okay, well, I'm with you in and of itself.

I would love to have seen that.

And Ricky Jay's, you know, that would have been phenomenal to be there in that room.

And Jim Steinmeier is a great consultant.

And Ricky Jay and Michael Weber are terrific.

So there's enough guys out there that do that work that are I think far better than me.

So I'll leave that to them.

So I kind of out of necessity ended up doing things that were easier for a school kid to do, which was card tricks.

And pretty soon after that, there was another TV show, The Secret Cabaret, which had Ricky Jay on it.

So that got me very into the sort of sleight of hand and gambling types of things.

And looking back at it, I've always sort of thought that maybe it's a little bit of a mixture of kind of Channing Pollock style, but Ricky Jay's material.

You know, it's kind of, if you imagine Ricky Channing doing Ricky Jay's material, maybe that's where I sort of ended up doing, doing sort of both.

So I got into, and I got very interested in the closeup stuff, but I always wanted to do a stage act.

And I think it's a good thing that I didn't at the time try and do anything like Channing Pollock.

But the film starts off talking about serendipity, meaningful coincidences.

And it's narrated by Ricky Jay, who's also an actor.

He was in one of the James Bond films.

And he's telling these various stories and they're claimed to be very real stories.