Teller - The Howdy Doody Magic Kit

 

 

I get way too much credit when I talk. [audience laughter] When I was five years old, I went out in the cold to make snow angels in the snow. About a week later, I came down with a cold and it went straight to my heart. I don't remember much about the stay in the hospital, except being strapped to a bed for a transfusion in the dark and a cold shaft of light coming under the door. But they fixed me and I went home to recover, assisted by toast, tea and television. 

 

My favorite character from television was Howdy Doody. For those of you who don't know, he was a cowboy marionette with red hair and freckles, and he had a burly pal named Buffalo Bob, and there was a Native American princess named Summerfall Winterspring. [audience laughter] But most important to me was Clarabell the Clown. 

 

Clarabell the Clown expressed himself without words, only with facial expressions and actions and magic tricks. I really liked Clarabel. And so, Howdy Doody was not shy about marketing to children. [chuckles] So, when they offered a Howdy Doody magic set, I dutifully sent away my 50 cents and my Three Musketeers wrappers and my index card with my name and address on it and waited eagerly for the magic set to assist in my convalescence. 

 

It arrived about two weeks later. It wasn't quite what I had pictured. I was expecting a box. But instead, it was a flat envelope, eight inches by nine inches. And on the front of it, there was a picture, a drawing of a young boy wearing a button up shirt and a huge magician's mustache, huge black handlebar mustache. He was pulling a rabbit out of a hat, and had a whole bunch of magic props on the table in front of him and he was exclaiming, “Here's your Howdy Doody magic set,” in a speech bubble. 

 

I opened up the kit. What was inside was some pieces of cardboard about the weight of shirt cardboard really quite colorfully and beautifully printed and scored, so that you could punch out the pieces and make three-dimensional magic props. In the magic set, there was a place where you had to sign your name and say you would never reveal the secrets. [audience laughter] But that was 65 years ago. [audience laughter] I think the statute of limitations has run out. 

 

My favorite thing in the kit was the magic chest, a small box that had in it, you guessed it, three miniature candy bars. You'd show your friend the three candy bars in there, and you'd shake up the box and two of the candy bars would disappear. It was really clever. It was really wonderful stuff. For some reason, this just hit me in the forehead like a diamond bullet. I guess it was the fact that this was the first time in my life that I realized that you could look at something, and understand what you thought it was and that could not be true. You could look at a miracle and it could actually be a trick. The idea that these two things could coexist, what was real and what wasn't, at the same time, in the same action, that paradox just dug deep into my brain like a weed that I haven't, for the last many years, been able to rip out with even a weed stick. 

 

I loved the magic kit and I performed for my parents. They were very happy that I had found something that I could do that wouldn't involve me running around and straining my heart. They supported this immensely. They snuck off to the local magic shop and bought me cups and balls and little directions that I followed to do. As I got older, I began to save up my money and I'd go to the magic shop. The magic shop experience was always marvelous, because you'd go in, and the proprietor of the magic shop would do a magic trick for you on the counter. 

 

And if you were mystified and couldn't figure it out and were just eager to learn how it worked, you gave the guy the money and the guy would give you the prop. And then, the greatest thing, the guy would take you behind the curtain, literally, there was a curtain, and explain how the trick worked and all the nuances of performance while your parents waited out in the magic shop. [audience laughter] Because they weren't magicians and they could not be privy to the secret. I began to perform maybe a little bit at Thanksgiving, when relatives would gather. 

 

Now, I should say magic is a very demanding form. There are only two settings. It's an on and off switch. Either it's a miracle or it's embarrassing. There's only those two. [audience laughter] There's no middle ground. It's not like, “Oh, I've missed the line.” It's like, “It's no longer a miracle.” As time passed, I started to do shows for very relatively well-behaved kids at neighborhood parties. The big hit of my show was the one where I'd stir around some ingredients in a pan, and then cover it over with a lid, and pull off the lid and there would be hard candy that I'd distribute to the kids. It was an automatic win. They give kids candy, they're going to like your show. Should try that nowadays. 

 

I went to the Philadelphia Public Library and I bought books on magic. I learned from those that if you learn to do close up magic, it could improve your social life. You could make friends more easily. So, when I went to high school, I tried it. I tried doing close up magic as a way to meet friends. If you are a high school student, let me tell you, it does not work. [audience laughter] The very last thing that you want to do when you are meeting a new friend is to lie to them. And magic is essentially a lie. So, if you do a magic trick and someone says, “How did you do that?” And you say, “I can't tell you because I'm a magician.” You're just screwed. [audience laughter] 

 

I retreated from magic and joined the drama club. Had a wonderful drama coach, but presently I found out he had been a magician since he was a kid. So, this magic was haunting me. He and I used to sit on the stage after rehearsals for hours and hours and talk about the strange place that magic occupied in theater. In a regular piece of theater, you know, what you're seeing is make believe, but you make it real to yourself. In magic, it's also a theatrical art. You also know that it's make believe, but you want it to look absolutely real and you want to bring to bear on it all of your skeptical abilities and you want to fail. What an interesting odd form of theater to become addicted to. 

 

My favorite teacher in high school was Mr. Knapp, my Latin teacher. I thought he had the ideal life. He came in, he did his Latin classes and I thought, I'm going to grow up and become a Latin teach and I won't do magic for a living, because nobody can earn a living doing magic. I'll become a Latin teacher and I'll do magic on the side. And so, I went to college to study Latin and Greek. The only performances I could get there were for fraternities which are only this much above the Cub Scouts. [audience laughter] But there, I made a discovery. I discovered that if I shut up like Clarabell and if I did things that were dangerous looking, suddenly, the frat boys would pay a little bit of attention. 

 

There's one show that sticks out in my mind. I was in the college pub. There was this big cylindrical room with several terraces and balconies above me with people sitting at tables. And I walked in. Now, the piece of my repertoire that was the strongest was my razor blade swallowing trick. I would swallow 10 razor blades, and then five feet of dental floss and bring the razor blades up apparently out of my stomach. I walked in and I had some light thrown on me, and I just started dead silent in the pub on a busy night to perform the razor blade trick. I take the razor blades out, test them, show they're sharp, swallow them one at a time. The immediate response was, cups of beer were dropped on me from all of the balconies, exploding like water balloons everywhere around me. But this time, I did not run away, like I ran away from the Cub Scouts. This time I just kept going. 

 

When I had my mouth examined to prove that the razor blades weren't just hiding in my mouth, but I'd actually swallowed them. When I swallowed the dental floss and brought up the razor blades all tied to the dental floss, I got a very strong round of applause. I felt like I'd learned something. I did become a Latin teacher. I taught for six years in Trenton, New Jersey, [audience laughter] which is a little bit above the Cub Scouts. [audience laughter] 

In the spring of the sixth year, two friends of mine, Penn and Weir, called me up and said, “We're putting together a performing troupe. Would you like to be a member of our troupe?” And I said, “Well, yeah. When are you doing shows?” And they said, “Through the summer and through October.” 

 

I realized that I'd been in school either as a student or a teacher for 22 years. I knew nothing of what life was outside of a school. So, I went to my principal and I said, “Could I have a year off as a leave of absence, as a sabbatical? And at the end of that, if I'm starving in an alley trying to be a magician, I will come back and I will teach Latin for you for the rest of my life.” And he said, “Yeah, sure.” He was an old marine and he was really cool. I loved him. 

 

That fall, I performed as a professional, really, for the first time at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival. I remember waking up one October morning at about 10:30 in the morning, hours after I knew my colleagues in the teaching profession had started their cars in the cold, and had driven in to sit in the coffee scented faculty room, and they were marking papers, and they were making lesson plans and I was there lying in bed thinking about how I was going to work on magic all day long. I was doing what I had dreamed of when I was five years old and went out in the cold and made snow angels in the snow. 

 

On my 60th birthday, my friend Jean, whom I've known half my life, brought me some birthday presents. There were socks and there were books and the last thing was in a shirt box. I opened the shirt box, and I pulled back the tissue paper and there was a picture of a young boy in a button up shirt with a big mustache pulling out a rabbit from a hat with a bunch of magic props on the table. 

 

My friend had gone on eBay and found a seller advertising a Howdy Doody magic set, the same kind that inspired Teller to go into magic. Of course, seeing images that I hadn't seen for 55 years, tears rolled down my cheeks. The objects were all flat and pristine in a plastic envelope, the way they should be archivally preserved. If I were anything like a proper collector, I would have kept them in that envelope. [audience laughter] But I didn't. I punched them out. I made the rabbit that jumped out of the hat. I made the mystic tray. I made the magic chest. And if you ever come over to my house, I want to show you three little candy bars in that chest, [audience laughter] shake it around and they'll be gone and I might just fool you. Thank you.