It's Magic

[tod]

The Lovely Mrs. tod and I have recently renewed our membership at The Magic Castle.

As befits its name, the Castle is a magical place. You enter by approaching a bookcase and saying a secret password to a golden owl with blinking red eyes. The bookcase slides into the wall, and a passageway opens into the Castle proper.

The two major offerings of the Castle are magic shows and booze. As Little tod said on one of the young-adult nights, "There's a bar at the bottom of the stairs, a bar at the top of the stairs, and just in case you can't make it all the way there's a bar halfway up the stairs."

There are three magic performance venues: The Palace of Mystery, the large showroom with a raised proscenium stage and seating for more than 100 people; the more-intimate Parlour of Prestidigitation, where magic is presented as in a living room for a party; and my favorite, the Close-Up Gallery, a small room that seats 22 that I have described as "a small room, a padded table, and no place to hide." The Parlour and Close-Up Gallery both feature two magicians nightly, one early, one late.

The place is filled with memorabilia and curiosities. The bar halfway up the stairs was made by a company that built prefab bar units for saloons and was used as a set at NBC. The foyer at one of the performance rooms is lined with caricatures of prominent magicians, and there's a "Hall of Fame" of prominent members of the Castle including Cary Grant, Doug Henning and Siegfried and Roy. An ornate white-and-gold bar was a prop from the movie "Hello Dolly!"

Then there's Irma, the invisible pianist who plays requests. I have never seen her stumped, and she's been there since the Castle opened in 1963 so that idea I had about voice-recognition software seems to be wrong.

The Castle is a club for magicians, and the bars are usually filled with people engaged in shop talk and trying out tricks on each other. In various places around the Castle there are padded, fringed tables with adjustable lighting overhead for impromptu magic shows. One table is still reserved for master slight-of-hand artist Dai Vernon, who was in residence at the Castle the last 20 or so years of his life. There is an unspoken agreement that only the best tricks be performed at that table.

As a private club, the Castle sets its own rules, including a stringent dress code that requires elegant dress among patrons -- a rule that is as well known in L.A. as the Disneyland Cast grooming standards -- and requires that invited guests on a member-issued guest pass pay a door fee and have dinner at the Castle restaurant.

We have fun in there. It's fun to be fooled, and it's fun to watch the execution of a trick when you know how it works. It's fun to introduce people to the place. I remember one wide-eyed friend whose reaction to every trick, all night, was a whispered "How'd he do that?"

I don't think she knew she was doing it.

It's nice to have a club again.

--t