Eugene weekly., January 19, 2006, Page 13, Image 13

AND MIRRORS
Hart Keene
PHOTO BY TODD COOPER
still visits Diaz’s 7th Avenue store, where
he moved the business last year. “I’ve
turned a lot of kids onto magic since I’ve
been here,” Diaz says. “It’s kind of neat to
see them get better and better.”
Another local magician, Kip Pascal,
took on a similar philosophy while teaching
Spanish at Churchill High School in
Eugene from 1995 to 2000. Pascal, the
author of Coin Snatching: The Reputation
Builder, used magic tricks to impress his
students and hold their attention. There was
one particularly uninterested student who,
in 1996, was forever changed by one simple
demonstration. “He starts doing magic one
day and I’m like ‘What the fuck’s going on
here?’” says Keene, who was in Pascal’s
class as a sophomore at Churchill. “He
started doing some crazy card trick and I’m
like, ‘Man, I have to learn that.’”
Pascal made a deal with Keene, his stu-
dent: If Keene improved his grade in
Pascal’s Spanish class, Pascal would train
Keene in his magic club. Then, in a Miagi-
esque display of education trickery, Pascal
trained his magic students, including Keene
and Jaques, to be successful magicians in
the long run by learning the building blocks
of magic first. “I wanted to give them tools
so they wouldn’t just get the move on page
56,” he says. “I would teach them a move
and then a trick and then combine moves
for a bigger trick.”
Keene complied, improving his Spanish
grade in exchange for the opportunity to
immerse himself in the world of magic.
KEENE ON THE JOB
One of the first things that patrons notice
when walking into Wyatt’s Eatery in
Albany is the 40-foot-high ceiling covered
with playing cards. For the last five years,
Wyatt’s has employed a magician for week-
ly shows, and the “Card on Ceiling” trick
has become somewhat of a trademark.
Keene, who took over the gig about two
years ago, has a volunteer choose one card
and write his or her name on it. He slides
the card in the middle of the deck, puts a
rubber band around it and hurls the whole
deck against the ceiling. The signed card
sticks while the deck falls back down. “It’s
entertainment that first-time customers can-
not believe we have here in Albany,
Oregon,” says Wyatt’s owner Mike Tudor.
During his shift, Keene strolls from
table to table and performs while patrons
wait for their food. He spends a few min-
utes with each table, reeling off three or
four tricks. “People want to come out and
celebrate a special occasion, so they say,
‘Let’s go here because they have a magi-
cian,’” he says.
Thursdays, the night Keene works, have
gone from one of the slower nights to one
of the most anticipated since Tudor hired
magicians. Regulars travel from as far as
Portland to catch the show. Tudor says the
entire restaurant staff eagerly awaits
Keene’s shifts. “In the restaurant you’re
kind of a superstar,” Keene says. “Everyone
wants to see you. People cheer for you and
it makes you feel good. It’s nice to be a
superhuman for a little while.”
GETTING YOUR
BRAIN TRICKED
Jerry Andrus, an 87-year-old man with
fluffy white hair and thin-rimmed gold
glasses, opens the back door to his three-
bedroom Victorian home. The house has
been deemed the Castle of Chaos out of
respect for the masterful illusions he pro-
duces within it. Andrus’ cramped kitchen is
packed with old mechanical parts, electrical
equipment, stacks of books and a wood-
burning stove. A treadmill with a computer
monitor at the top blocks the doorway to the
next room. He steps onto the treadmill,
straps himself in and wraps a metal wire
around his arm. Now he can write free-
verse poetry while getting his daily exer-
cise. “I have to ground myself or the fric-
tion shorts out the computer,” he explains.
Andrus, a former electrician and consum-
mate tinkerer, houses his keyboard in a metal
casing that holds additional switches, but-
tons and movable palm holders that he added
to increase efficiency. “To hit backspace you
have to reach way over here. So I moved it
here,” he says, pointing to a metal wire bent
from the backspace key toward the enter key.
Andrus’ keyboard is one of many day-
to-day modifications that the sleight-of-
hand expert and internationally renowned
illusionist has made in his home for more
than 70 years. He says it’s not difficult for
him to invent things.
One of his most famous inventions is a an
illusion called Box Impossible, a large wood-
en box frame that looks like two of the verti-
cal two-by-fours are behind perpendicular
boards that they should be in front of. Your
brain cannot distinguish the difference
between Box Impossible and an ordinary box
frame, so Andrus stands inside the box only
to walk casually “through” the side and out.
“We all live in a very wonderful, real
world among our manufactured images of it,”
he wrote in the October 1989 issue of Genii:
The International Conjurers Magazine,
which featured Box Impossible on the cover.
“These manufactured images become our
reality, and that is one reason magic works …
That’s what permits us to survive!”
Andrus frequently attends International
Brotherhood of Magicians meetings, which
take place the third Sunday of every month in
Albany. His interest in illusions is somewhat
philosophical, and he believes that by know-
ing how the brain can misinterpret informa-
tion, people can be more skeptical of things
they see in the world around them. “I don’t
think illusions are important to magic itself,”
he says. “They’re important to human beings
— to realize that they can hold something in
their own hand that they know what it is and
their mind beneath the conscious level will
overpower what they think it is.”
Dr. Ray Hyman, a 77-year-old UO psy-
chology professor, magician and friend of
Andrus’, agrees that performing illusions is
a masterful way of studying the human
brain. But there’s a flip side, one that adver-
tisers and politicians understand quite well.
Both Dr. Hyman and Andrus recognize the
possibilities for fraud and scams because of
our natural tendency to believe our brains.
“The key component is just being human,”
Hyman says. “The brain cannot be absolute-
ly perfect. It works very well in situations to
which it’s adapted, and works automatically
most of the time. But put in the situation in
which it’s not adept, then it can misfire.”
Dr. Hyman spent time during the 1970s
disproving popular psychics and mentalists
who started making big bucks off people who
believed their powers were real. Mind tricks
were as simple as the famous Uri Geller ask-
ing volunteers to think of two geometric
shapes, one inside the other, but not to think
of a square. Nine times out of 10 the person
would choose a triangle inside a circle.
“These are the easiest geometric designs
people can think of anyway,” Hyman says.
Hyman and Andrus began “The
Mysticians” meetings for magic enthusiasts
during the 1960s and continue to meet in
the community room of the EWEB build-
ing the final Monday of every month.
X-ELENCE
Asher and Stone’s waitress-terrorizing
dinner transpired during the final stage of last
year’s X-elent Lecture Series — a bi-month-
ly, eight-city lecture tour organized by Asher,
which has attracted some of the best magi-
cians in the world to the Pacific Northwest
JANUARY 19, 2006 13