The illusions were less “ta-da!” moments than metaphors for the stories that we tell about ourselves-and what we hide. DelGaudio jettisoned most of the trappings of magic shows and used his prestidigitation skills in service of a meditation on identity. His show “In & Of Itself,” directed by Frank Oz, opened Off Broadway in 2017 and ran for more than a year. ![]() And I try to use the skills that I have to reveal more than I conceal.” But it took him years to figure out what that would look like. Now, if pressed on what he does for a living, he squirms and says, “I make things. It was a way of isolating myself from others at school.” When the magic-shop guy took him to see a veteran conjurer perform at a local hotel, DelGaudio felt a wave of revulsion, took a cab home, and scribbled in his journal, “I am not interested in fooling people.” It was something I could do in my room alone. “It was sort of a meditative practice, if anything. “I did it for myself,” he told me recently. But, unlike most kids who learn magic, he had little interest in performing. He practiced for hundreds of hours in his bedroom. As he absorbed everything that his mentor knew, he also studied videos of the masters. DelGaudio discovered a magic shop in town, and he started spending lots of time there, learning card tricks from the owner, who became a kind of surrogate dad. He was living outside Colorado Springs with his mother, a gay firefighter whose sexuality made the two of them outcasts among their conservative neighbors. DelGaudio, who is thirty-six and baby-faced, learned sleight of hand as a teen-ager in Colorado. More than that, there’s something elemental about magic shows that bugs DelGaudio: he doesn’t like to deceive people, and that is, no matter how you slice it, a big part of the job. ![]() All the cringey clichés that make people love magic, or hate magic, or allow them to put magic in a box of preconceptions, covered in chains and submerged in a water tank. ![]() Or maybe the overblown spectacles of David Blaine or David Copperfield. Derek DelGaudio has a fraught relationship with the word “magician.” He knows what it evokes: rabbits, top hats, leggy assistants getting sawed in half.
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