Pop, the Question (S6: E44)
Professor Magic
Featured Guest Fred Siegel, PhD (Teaching Professor of English and Director, First-Year Writing Program, Department of English & Philosophy, College of Arts and Sciences, Drexel University)
Host and Producer Melinda Lewis, PhD (Associate Director, Marketing & Media)
Dean Paula Marantz Cohen, PhD (Dean, Pennoni Honors College)
Executive Producer Erica Levi Zelinger (Director, Marketing & Media)
Producer Brian Kantorek (Assistant Director, Marketing & Media)
Research and Script Melinda Lewis, PhD
Audio Engineering and Editing Brian Kantorek
Original Theme Music Brian Kantorek
Production Assistance Noah Levine
Social Media Outreach Jaelynn Vesey
Graphic Design Kat Heller
Logo Design Michal Anderson
Additional Voiceover Malia Lewis
Recorded September 29, 2022 through virtual conferencing.
Pop, the Question is a production of Marketing & Media in Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University.
The views expressed in this podcast are not necessarily those of Drexel University or Pennoni Honors College.
Visit "The Smart Set" at www.thesmartset.com/magic-class for a related essay by Fred Siegel.
Copyright © 2022 Drexel University
Episode Summary
Magic has a way of (abracadabra!) appearing ubiquitously throughout popular culture. Integrated with mysticism and illusion is the core element of performance, transcending the carnival atmosphere and stage into other arenas of human life and interaction. Host Dr. Melinda Lewis talks with magician, improv comedian, Drexel University English writing professor, and overall “Man of Mystery” Dr. Fred Siegel to uncover the allure of the magic genre, its evolution, and its performative relevance to life on stage and in the classroom.
TRANSCRIPT
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Page 1 of 11
Speaker 1:
You get a car, you get a car, you get a car.
Melinda Lewis:
Welcome to Pop, the Question, a podcast that exists at the intersection of pop culture and academia.
We sit down and talk about our favorite stuff through the lenses of what we do and who we are. From
Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University, Dr. Melinda Lewis here. I'm your host.
I am here with Fred Siegel, teaching professor of English here at Drexel University, and where he's also
the director of the first year writing program. And we are going to be talking about magic and
performance in everyday life and teaching.
Hey Fred.
Fred Siegel:
Hey. Thanks for having me, Melinda.
Melinda Lewis:
It's my pleasure. I was telling a friend of mine, magic is one of those things that people either really
seem to love or really seem to dislike. And I feel like the root of both is the deception part. I actually love
being deceived in that way because I consume so much that when I am thoroughly surprised, I'm like,
"Childhood wonder unlocked."
Fred Siegel:
I think a lot of it has to do with how you do it. There's a lot of obnoxiousness. Well, there are obnoxious
performers in all contexts.
Melinda Lewis:
Yeah.
Fred Siegel:
If you make people feel good, you can do magic in such a way that people enjoy it. Now, if you're going
to make do magic in such a way that it makes people feel stupid, you're not going to win any friends or
influence people.
Melinda Lewis:
Is that part of how you got started on this journey? Or is it, "I fell in love with the 'Got your nose' and it
just all got there from there?"
Fred Siegel:
There's truth in all of those. So my one man show, Man of Mystery, tries to answer the question in
several ways about how I started. I mean, one answer is you're a little kid and you get a magic kit, and,
"Oh my gosh, this little plastic thing here," where you pick it up and there's a ball in it and then do this,
and then it's gone, and maybe the adults don't know exactly how it happened, or maybe they're fooling
you and pretending they don't know how it happened. I mean, what better thing is there for an eight
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year old who has no control over anything? And in my case, it's a little kid who wants to deceive people,
who wants to have power.
Melinda Lewis:
Yeah.
Fred Siegel:
Because I wasn't going to get power by shooting baskets really well, right? I wasn't going to get power
by running the sprint faster than all the other kids. But I was able to do this.
Speaker 5:
And now...
Speaker 6:
Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat.
Speaker 5:
Again?
Speaker 6:
Nothing up my sleeve, presto. Don't know my own strength.
Speaker 5:
Now here's something we hope you'll really like.
Fred Siegel:
Another part of the answer is, Uncle Phil would pull a quarter out from behind my ear, and that was a
beautiful and loving thing. So that's part of it. I often tell the story of the Ape Girl who I saw in Atlantic
City, New Jersey. This was a million dollar pier, but it used to be an amusement pier. And in front of it,
there was a tent on the boardwalk, and you'd see the Ape Girl. The Ape Girl. You see the hair grow. See
the Ape Girl, the Ape Girl, the Ape Girl.
Pay your 75 cents and you would go into the room, into this dank little tent, and the woman gradually
turns into a gorilla. Every time they hit the gong, she becomes a little bit more of a gorilla, and by the
fourth time, she's full gorilla. Well, there was a book in my school library called More Fun With Magic.
And I read all the magic books, I loved the magic books, that was literature to me. And at the end of that
book, there was something called "The Black Art Change Cabinet". And what I'm looking at here in the
Ape Girl is The Black Art Change Cabinet made big.
Instead of changing your sister's dolly into a skeleton, they changed a real live woman into a big, hairy
ugly gorilla, because I knew how it was done. It was a 19th century trick. But once the Ape Girl turned
into the gorilla and she started shaking the cage, and I'm watching this thing and I think, "This is nothing,
I'm not scared." And then all of a sudden she breaks out of the cage, and she lunges. And eight year old
Fred, fully aware of the piece of glass that enabled the reflection to make it look like this woman turned
into a gorilla, I was out of there. I was out of there instantaneously, and the people outside were looking
at me laughing.
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Speaker 1:
(Singing).
Fred Siegel:
So there was this tremendous power in that magic trick. And also, I think that was the weekend my dad
bought me my first Svengali deck.
Melinda Lewis:
Oh.
Fred Siegel:
So that's the one where they all turn into the Ace of Spades or whatever that card is. Mine was a six of
hearts. I wanted the Ace of Spade.
Melinda Lewis:
Yeah.
Fred Siegel:
I did wind up getting an Ace of Spades deck because in my Man of Mystery show, I begin by talking
about when I first saw this, it was the TV magic cards. Marshall Brodien would do the Bengali deck with
an ace of spades.
Marshall Brodien:
Hi, I'm Marshall Brodien, a professional magician. Most magic tricks are easy once you know the secret.
Now take magic cards. You don't have to be a magician to perform all kinds of amazing card tricks
because it works by itself. Six or 60, you can work TV Magic Cards, the mechanical deck that works all by
itself.
Speaker 7:
TV Magic Cards, just $1.98 at Dominic's Finer Foods, Gold Blasts, or wherever you see the sign, and at
Walgreen and Walgreen agency drug stores.
Fred Siegel:
One of the other things that happens during the weekend I saw the Ape Girl, I saw men perform with
magic cards where any card could transform into the ace of spades. So I wanted to be able to actually
have an ace of spades.
Melinda Lewis:
At the time that you're coming of age, is magic a thing or is this somewhat kind of marginal?
Fred Siegel:
I came of age about in time for a seventies magic renaissance. 1970, 71 had a guy named Mark Wilson,
who used to have a kiddy show on television, but he had a series of television specials now called Magic
Circus.
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Speaker 8:
Now here's the man with the magic touch. Mark Wilson.
Mark Wilson:
Welcome to the show. Now for the next few minutes, what you see may be hard to believe, but actually
magic is quite simple.
Fred Siegel:
And Doug Henning, by 1974, stars on Broadway in The Magic Show, and it becomes a bigger thing.
Suddenly you start having yearly specials.
Speaker 10:
Thank you. Welcome to my World of Magic, a world of wonder and enchantment.
Fred Siegel:
Doug Henning had a yearly special, suddenly Copperfield appears and starts having specials. Oh man, I
used to watch all of them at this point. There's so much magic on so many different channels that I don't
even try to keep up with at all. But oh, young Fred would've watched anything and everything.
Melinda Lewis:
It's so interesting because I've been watching, I've been mostly watching Colombo for the past couple of
months, and they have at least two or three magician episodes spread throughout time. To your point,
there's a small child explaining magic to Colombo, and he is like, "How do you do that trick?"
Speaker 11:
You a magician?
Speaker 12:
Nah, just a cop. You a magician?
Speaker 11:
Watch this. Pick a card. Anyone you like. Got it?
Speaker 12:
Got it.
Speaker 11:
In the middle.
Speaker 12:
No, you cut in the middle.
Speaker 11:
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No, it's not, it's on the top. What's your card?
Speaker 12:
Hey, Ace of Diamonds.
Speaker 11:
Is this the Ace of Diamonds?
Speaker 12:
Let's do that again.
Fred Siegel:
A lot of shows had a magic episode. Across genres. The Brady Bunch, one of the kids on The Brady Bunch
got into magic for a while.
Melinda Lewis:
Yeah. I wasn't it like Peter?
Fred Siegel:
Yeah, it was Peter.
Speaker 13:
Peter the Great. Ladies and gentlemen, observe the linking rings are linked...
Speaker 14:
And they're still linked.
Speaker 13:
Abra Cadabra.
Speaker 15:
Yay.
Melinda Lewis:
I mean, maybe this is reaching, but I'm thinking about the magician kind of controlling the narrative and
controlling the trick, but also allowing space for the audience to come up with their own story or their
own understanding of what the trick actually is.
Fred Siegel:
I think what they come to see, they come to see something that they know can't be done. They want to
see something impossible happen. So let's talk the torn and restored newspaper. The magician takes a
newspaper and rips it to pieces, and then suddenly the newspaper restores itself. It just unrolls, it
unfolds, and it's back to the way it was. Now, my presentation of that trick is to recall when Doug
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Henning did that trick. So in a sense, I'm telling a story about my life in magic. I'm telling a story about
how I was inspired. I'm telling a story about how I was fascinated. I was telling a story about the greatest
magician of my childhood. There are some magicians who've made a big splash in the world of magic. So
let's think about Penn and Teller for whom a magic show is a discussion of believing in foolish things or a
promotion of skepticism.
Penn:
We could not agree more. We've been thrown out of The Magic Circle and The Magic Castle for giving
away magic secrets. Giving away magic secrets, or rather not giving away magic secrets, is not a moral
rule, it's a compositional rule. And when you're starting out and you're doing a trick for somebody, and
afterwards they say, "How did you do that?" If you tell them the illusion crumbles.
Fred Siegel:
While pen and teller will tell you very directly and in many different ways over and over, that they're full
of it. That this is a bunch of lies for your entertainment. And by the way, these lies, you might be having
other lies told to you. Whereas you have somebody like David Blaine, and I got to tell you, I have friends
who don't know much about magic, but see David Blaine and they think, "Well, he's real, isn't he?" He's
kind of like a shaman or something.
Melinda Lewis:
Yeah.
Fred Siegel:
Of course he's blurring the boundaries because some of what he's doing is a sideshow thing, but another
subject that I'm interested in and have some experience with.
Melinda Lewis:
Do you want to talk a little bit about your experience with the sideshow?
Fred Siegel:
Sure. First of all, one of my earliest recollections is going to Madison Square Garden when I was a little
kid. They still had the Ringling Brothers Barnam and Bailey Circus, but they still had a side showing. And I
remember seeing the Alligator Skin Man, and I'd seen some other side shows. But these days, most
performances of that nature are people doing what would've been called "A working act". They learned
how to eat fire, they learned how to hammer nails up their nose, they learned how to swallow swords.
And was when I was in graduate school, I was going to NYU in the late eighties, early nineties, and
nothing more fun than going to Coney Island during the summer.
And there's a side show at Coney Island, for God's sake, there was Melvin Burkhart, The Anatomical
Wonder. The man who grows, the man who can breathe through one lung at a time. He's also the twofaced
man who could smile on one side of his face while frowning on the other. Yes, he could be mad
and glad all at the same time. They also had Screwy Louie, the human blockhead, the man who could
drive nails, ice picks, and 20 penny spikes into the center of his head with a hammer, and yet he lived to
laugh and joke about it. All real, or your money back. And I used to, I'd go on The Cyclone, I'd eat a hot
dog at Nathan's, always The Cyclone before the hot dog.
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Melinda Lewis:
Well, yeah. Might be dangerous the other way around.
Fred Siegel:
In the summer of '89, I did three weekends, and then the final following year, Melvin had retired and I
was asked to come in. I did it. I did the side show. I just did weekends because I was teaching at NYU
during the week. I was teaching composition as a graduate student. I was taking classes. But I did over
300 shows that summer in just those 10 or so... I became rather fearless as the performer.
Speaker 17:
Hey, it's your mom. I have a question about that podcast you do. Are you on the Instagram, or the
Twitter, or the Facebook? If I have an idea for a podcast, how do I get in touch with you? Love you.
Melinda Lewis:
'Sup Mom? Yeah. So you can find us on all those things actually. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. Just go to
Pop Quest Pod on any one of those and follow. If you want to send us ideas, you can either go over to
our website and leave us a message at Pop Q Podcast, or you can get us directly at popq@drexel.edu.
You can actually find us on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher. I can help set it up when I get home, but then you
have to promise me to rate and review. All right, love you. Bye. I know that you referenced popular
magicians, but in terms of popular culture narratives about magicians, are there texts that you think get
it right or are they all maligning the magician?
Fred Siegel:
Okay, so we recently saw a remake of Nightmare Alley. The remake is good, and the original version was
good, but it was based on a book. And it's about a kind of carny who learns the secrets of "Mind
reading" and becomes a terribly exploitative person. There's a case in which the Magician is a
malevolent character.
Speaker 18:
He could charm his way out of anything.
Speaker 19:
That's a man after my own heart. Tell me more.
Speaker 18:
About him?
Speaker 19:
Sure. About you.
Speaker 18:
What about me?
Speaker 19:
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I know that you like chocolates and you like to read.
Speaker 18:
And dancing.
Speaker 19:
When's the last time he did?
Speaker 18:
A while?
Speaker 19:
Yeah, we're going to fix that. You ready?
Fred Siegel:
They got the way that sideshow looked, so right. You kind of learn how some of these "tricks" are done,
and it's actually bringing up something significant, because I wrote in my dissertation about the
difference between conjuring and para-conjuring. One of the ways in which magic changed in the era of
Vaudeville is that you had a whole category of magic act. And I'm counting in that category fortune
telling kind of act. An act in which one partner communicates information to the other partner,
psychically. Houdini, escaping from something. It's not a trick, a trick in the sense that there's a secret
mechanism, but sometimes he would also escape from a straight jacket legitimately, and he would do a
lot of his escapes legitimately. Hypnotism, something that is sort of legitimate, but maybe not so
legitimate as it was practiced on stages.
There's a whole new category of this. It's very strange that we've evolved to the point where a lot of
people see magicians in the context of reality television shows. You've got America's Got Talent and
you've got... Well, Penn and Teller, Penn and Teller's show is something different. I love their show. But,
okay, so how people are depicted though, you see America's Got Talent and you're talking about the
personal issues of these performers. So, that, I don't watch that at all.
Melinda Lewis:
I mean, reality television is about the emotional manipulation, right? So it's presenting it in a particular
way that is usually with the dramatic music and the comeuppance narrative, or coming from nowhere
and succeeding because of this show that we've put on, which doesn't really feel authentic or exciting.
Speaker 20:
This is me when I was one year old, this is when the real magic began for me. And these are my special
memories since I started the magic. Ever since I was little, I'd love to play with the imagination because
in my imagination, any magic was possible like this.
Fred Siegel:
I miss Ed Sullivan. He didn't care about their lives. You just had one act. The mouse would come out and
say, "I love you, Andy." And then the guy would spin the plates and then an opera singer would come
out that I like.
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Melinda Lewis:
I think about this all the time actually, in thinking about what it means to go up in front of a class and try
to do partially razzle dazzling, because I'm really excited about what we're doing, so a part of that
though, for me, involves the work of trying to get them excited as well. And that requires me to perform
and be like, isn't this... I'm the barker in this scenario.
Speaker 21:
All right, ladies and gentlemen, step right up. Hurry, hurry, hurry. See the spectacular shooting show and
guest display.
Melinda Lewis:
But it sounds like for you, is it all performative?
Fred Siegel:
Would you like me to make the argument that my performing life is separate, or that my performing life
is the same as my teaching life? You tell me. I'm making your argument.
Melinda Lewis:
Which do you feel is the most accurate?
Fred Siegel:
Okay, I'm going to tell you a story. Can I tell you a story? I was a baby teacher, a tiny little teacher at
NYU. I was small enough to fit in your pocket. And I'm doing one of my early classes, and I always had a
file card with a list of what I'm going to do in class. And the first thing on the list, it always said "Take
roll". And one day the student on my right looks at my card and says, "You spelled that wrong." Yeah.
And I spelled it R O L E. So I said to her, "Well, I realized calling role is usually R O L L, but I'm also taking
R O L E because I'm taking the role of the teacher." And at this point in my career, that was a stretch. So
this idea of taking role for me has been hugely useful as a writing teacher and as a person thinking about
human interaction.
Now that said, it has to be a very interactive kind of performance. This being a performer, we're doing it
whether we want to or not, whether we know it or not. So my performance life is not separate. And
another link on the chain of my performance stuff is my experience doing improv. Starting from, I
auditioned for "Grandma Sylvia's Funeral", but a lot of it was interacting with people. I'd go up to people
say, "Oh, Shalom, did you know my grandma?" I eventually auditioned for "Comedy Sports" and got in
and I'm still in. And I did "Come and Groove". That was long form improv. So it is performing, but the
other people in the room are also performers.
Melinda Lewis:
Yes.
Fred Siegel:
Whether they know it or not.
Melinda Lewis:
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I was going to ask a question about whether or not it was hard or is hard to move from performing as a
magician, where you have a lot of control in the performance, to improv where you are dependent, you
are constantly collaborating, but at the same time, you're also doing the same kind of things of providing
the illusion that these scenarios are seamless. There's still a slight of hand, there's still a sense of
creating something out of, assumingly, nothing.
Fred Siegel:
Right, well, improv sure does seem magical when it works well.
Melinda Lewis:
1000%.
Fred Siegel:
And yet the bar isn't that high when you're creating something off the cuff like that, just doing the most
obvious thing is the best. It makes people feel, "Oh my..." It looks incredible. Well, magic is very
interactive too. The disadvantage of doing magic is that in most cases, I'm the only magician. But in an
improv show, if things are working as they should, I'm on stage with a bunch of other people who want
me to succeed and who I want to succeed. And if everybody is doing their job well, and everybody
makes everybody else look good. Easy. To wrap this up though, Melinda, I want to say how much I
appreciate and enjoyed having this conversation with you. So thank you for inviting me.
Melinda Lewis:
Fred. This was truly my pleasure.
Fred Siegel:
And let me tell you, the great thing about Zoom is that you can be doing this right now. The audience,
people are listening to this. It's happening. But I've been twiddling with these cards pretty much the
whole conversation. I've been trying not to be loud.
Melinda Lewis:
I didn't and it was such an illusion.
Fred Siegel:
Nice.
Melinda Lewis:
It is to me.
Fred Siegel:
All right, thanks a lot. Take care.
Melinda Lewis:
Yeah, thanks, Fred.
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Pop, the Question was researched and hosted by Dr. Melinda Lewis. Our theme music and episodes are
produced by Brian Kantorek with additional audio production by Noah Levine. All of this was done under
the directorship of Erica Levi Zelinger, the deanship of Dr. Paula Marantz Cohen, and the Pennoni
Honors College at Drexel University.
Speaker 22:
I do. I honestly do. We talking about practice man. What are we talking about? We're talking about
practice, man.