![]() Houdini spent a lifetime escaping shackles, ropes and steel bondage. His acts were rooted in endurance, skill and pain tolerance, obscured by seemingly unexplainable magic. When I was in grade school, I stumbled on a paperback biography of the magician, where I learned about his lifelong commitment to debunking spiritualists, communicators to the dead and psychics. I was here because Harry Houdini lives in the background of my memories, blurry and unreal, and visiting the museum gave me the chance to reconnect with one of my first heroes of art and theater. I felt a slight pressure on my neck, which may have been my body remembering to draw in breath. I could see everything so clearly.Īfter a few false starts to build tension, Dietrich pushed the sword into the collar and out the other end: a toothpick spearing a cocktail olive. The kids' smiles and energy, the older magic enthusiasts' knowing grins, the confusion and frozen half-smile on my wife's face. I turned and looked directly under the lights at the crowd in front of me. "I'm going to run this sharp sword straight through your neck. "You feel this?" she asked, as she slid the sword through the wooden collar, poking my neck with a cool metal point. "You see this," she said, as she sliced the newspaper with a sword. I clamped the square collar around my neck as Dietrich held up a piece of newspaper. On stage, Dietrich asked me, "Are you afraid of swords or being confined?" Normally, it would depend on the situation, I thought, but I said no, and she picked up a thick square collar of wood, with a rounded-out center and a hinge on one side. (In a videoon YouTube, Dietrich stands behind a plate of glass as a man fires a bolt-action rifle aimed at her face.) In 1988, Dietrich, who co-owns and operates the museum with her partner, fellow magician Dick Brookz, famously became the first woman to successfully perform the bullet-catching trick, which has killed, purportedly, a dozen magicians. I was at the Houdini Museum in downtown Scranton, Pennsylvania. She held her gaze for a moment toward the back of the crowd and straightened her finger, "You there, sir," summoning me to the stage. She scanned the cross-legged children seated before her and the crowd of teenagers, parents and other adults behind them. She raised a flat hand to her eyebrows, almost in mock salute, looking for a volunteer. Dorothy Dietrich, the First Lady of Magic, stood alone on a compact stage, her blond hair stark against the backdrop of heavy red curtains.
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