secrets of magus / mark singer for the new yorker [1993]
really fascinating profile of ricky jay, magician, actor, weirdo:
I once asked [David] Mamet whether Jay had ever shared with him details of his childhood.Mamet replied, “I can’t remember.”
I said, “You can’t remember whether you discussed it or you can’t remember the details?”
He said, “I can’t remember whether or not I know a better way to dissuade you from your reiteration of that question without seeming impolite.”
Jay’s condensed version of his early life goes like this: “I grew up like Athena—covered with playing cards instead of armor—and, at the age of seven, materialized on a TV show, doing magic.” Confronted with questions about his parents, he suggests a different topic. Whatever injuries were inflicted, his mother and his father were apparently equally guilty. Any enthusiasm he ever expressed they managed not to share. “I’m probably the only kid in history whose parents made him stop taking music lessons,” he says. “They made me stop studying the accordion. And, I suppose, thank God.” He loved to play basketball. There was a backboard above the garage of the family house, which had aluminum siding. “Don’t dent the house!” his mother routinely warned. His father oiled his hair with Brylcreem and brushed his teeth with Colgate. “He kept his toothpaste in the medicine cabinet and the Brylcreem in a closet about a foot away,” Jay recalls. “Once, when I was ten, I switched the tubes. All you need to know about my father is that after he brushed his teeth with Brylcreem he put the toothpaste in his hair.”
