Now You See It....

by Colin Hunter

Published in The Record Sept. 2, 2006.

An old man in a tuxedo stumbles onstage, shielding his
eyes from the glare of the spotlight. He stifles a
boozy hiccup, wobbles slightly and gazes at the audience through
his monocle. The poor, drunken schmuck seems utterly befuddled as
to how he has ended up in front of a
packed theatre.

He's doubly confused when a deck of playing cards suddenly
fans open in his own white-gloved hand. He throws the
deck to the stage floor, only to be surprised by
the appearance of another deck in his hand. Then another,
and another.

He can't figure out what's happening to him.

His mouth hangs agape in shock. Then about a dozen
cards cascade out of it.

His besotted eyes bulge, his monocle falls out, and laughter
fills Roy Thomson Hall.

*

About a dozen blocks away, a slick young man saunters
through the midway at the Canadian National Exhibition.

In his flawlessly pressed tan suit, complete with suede vest
and tilted fedora, he looks like he could have just
emerged from the pages of The Great Gatsby.

He pulls a deck of cards from his jacket pocket
and starts shuffling. People stop, gather, gawk.

There's a glimmer in the man's blue eyes and a
smirk on his lips that convey a clear message: I
know something you don't know.

A woman carrying a bag of blue cotton candy asks
him if he's going to do a trick.

"Ma'am," he replies in a heartbeat, "I'm going to do
a miracle."

*

Roman Szydlowski and Stephen Elvay are different in as many
ways as they are similar.

At 71, Szydlowski has been confounding audiences -- under his
stage name, Romaine -- since long before 38-year-old Elvay was
born.

The two have never met, though each knows of the
other's name and reputation through the grapevine of the insular
magic community.

They play to different crowds, with different routines, garnering different
responses. Elvay is a wisecracking motormouth; Romaine's drunk character says
nothing.

Both live in Kitchener, but spend much of the year
on the road, going where the gigs are.

What they share most fundamentally is an art. Both are
practitioners of the oldest, purest form of magic, sleight of
hand.

Through countless hours of study and practice, each has developed
the quicker-than-the-eye dexterity needed to accomplish seemingly impossible feats with
skill alone, no smoke or mirrors.

Theirs is a fading art, an old-school technique overshadowed by
flashy pyrotechnic illusions and gross-out gimmickry performed by magicians of
the MTV mould.

But neither feels any desire to update his act.

To them, classic sleight of hand is entertainment at its
most honest, most skilful, and most beautiful.

*

Romaine is not a drunk, but he plays one onstage.

In fact, he sips a non-alcoholic beer as he sits
in the basement -- the "magic dungeon" -- of his
Kitchener home a few days before the Toronto gig.

What he does onstage is extremely difficult to accomplish sober,
requiring lightning reflexes and nimble fingers. It would be near-impossible
if he were even a little tipsy.

His basement has a faint scent of damp wood and
old books. Shelves on the wall sag under thick volumes
about conjuring, sleight of hand, and physical comedy.

Romaine is renowned as one of the world's top sleight
of hand performers, yet he still buys every new publication
about magic he can find.

Written in black marker on a Post-It note stuck to
the wall is the maxim: "Commit yourself to constant improvement."
In his field, there is no other option.

"I'm a manipulator, in the old, classic style of manipulation,"
he says.

"My love in magic has always been in manipulation, not
because it's easy, but because it's hard -- the hardest.
Not just anybody can come along and do what I
do. That gives you a hell of a sense of
accomplishment."

Romaine is revered by magicians around the world as the
"Monarch of Manipulators." An instructional DVD he put out a
few years ago is considered an invaluable resource for advanced
magic technique.

"He's one of the very best in the world at
what he does," says Phil Cox, owner of Kind of
Magic, a hocus pocus supply store in the Princess Twin
cinemas building in Waterloo.

"People try to duplicate what he does, but no one
can."

With the gig at Roy Thomson Hall just days away,
Romaine has upped his practice time from the usual hour
or two a day to six or seven hours.

The gig is the RBC Seniors Jubilee, an annual variety
show staged by performers over 50, for a generally older
audience. To keep the show moving, Romaine has been told
to trim down his routine -- The Drunk Act, as
he calls it -- from the usual 12 minutes down
to nine.

He guesses he has performed The Drunk Act tens of
thousands of times over the past half-century, yet it requires
as much practice now as ever.

Even while sitting in his tattered recliner, sipping his faux
beer, he manipulates a billiard ball in his hand, making
it dance around every finger.

His fingers, surprisingly, are stubby and inelegant, like plump sausages
attached to his hand. It's as if nature conspired against
his becoming a sleight of hand man.

He was 10 years old when he saw his first
magician, a rabbit-and-hat children's performer who came to his family's
church in Montreal.

"I was completely fascinated," he recalls, "and I knew that's
what I wanted to do."

By 14, he had resolved to master an offshoot of
magic, ventriloquism, and bought himself a dummy.

"I was a very shy kid," he says, "so the
dummy was my alter ego. The dummy was the mask
I hid behind, the one that told all the jokes
I wanted to tell."

When the spring mechanism behind the dummy's mouth broke at
the end of one performance, it occurred to Romaine that
he should keep some magic tricks handy onstage, as a
kind of backup plan.

The backup plan became his life's work.

"It's a love," he says. "It's a passion. It's the
greatest job in the world."

*

A human river flows through the clattering, blinking midway of
the CNE, between the Tilt-A-Whirls and ring toss booths.

Stephen Elvay moves upstream through the fray, looking for the
perfect spot to set up his velvet-topped conjuring table.

"The street is my stage," he says. "This is as
raw as it gets."

This is only the second day of his 18-day stint
at the CNE, but Elvay is about to begin his
umpteenth impromptu performance.

Carnival crowds are a different breed of audience than Elvay
gets performing in theatres or at corporate parties -- more
fickle, less patient, overstimulated by rides and noise and sugar.

"Here, I have to build my audience," he says. "I'm
not the star here. They didn't buy a ticket to
see me. I've got to be good enough to draw
people and keep them entertained."

Hence the look -- the suit, the fedora, the knowing
smirk, the deck of cards. He looks the part of
a guy who can wow you with magic while simultaneously
relieving you of your wallet. Lucky for his audience, he
uses his powers for good, not evil.

"Folks, may I have a few minutes of your time?"
he asks an older couple passing by.

"Absolutely," replies Mary Fitzpatrick, who tugs her reluctant husband, Doug,
toward Elvay's table.

"Would you like to see a good trick or a
great trick?" Elvay asks.

"A great trick."

"Well, I haven't got any of those," he jokes. "But
watch this."

The rapid-fire patter is as old as magic itself: pick
a card, any card, sign your name across the face,
put it back in the deck. We've never met before,
correct?

Fitzpatrick draws the eight of hearts and signs her name
on it in elegant cursive handwriting.

More people stop at Elvay's table to see what's going
on. The crowd swells from three to 10, to 15,
then 25. Elvay quips, "Nothing draws a crowd like a
crowd."

By the time Elvay produces the signed eight of hearts
in the first of many baffling ways, the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd
is up to 30, people in the back standing on
their toes to get a glimpse of the conjuror at
work.

He makes coins seemingly transport from one clenched fist to
another. He turns a borrowed $20 bill into an American
$1 note (and, after much cajoling, changes it back again).

His big finish: he makes Fitzpatrick's eight of hearts appear
once again, this time folded and paper-clipped shut in Fitzpatrick's
own hand.

"Ma'am," he says to her, "The look on your face
is absolutely priceless."

The wide-eyed Fitzpatricks wander into the midway, Mary still clutching
her signed card.

"That was amazing," she says. "And a bit frightening."

"I've seen magic before," adds her husband, "but I've never
seen anybody like him."

*

It's tough to learn a trade when all the best
practitioners are sworn to secrecy.

Romaine and Elvay started the way most magicians do: with
a book, a desire to entertain and the willingness to
commit to endless practice.

By the time Romaine was 20, he had a full-time
contract with airplane manufacturer Canadair, performing for employees at air
force bases around the country.

When the popularity of magic began to wane in the
1970s, and magic clubs were being converted to discos, he
found steadier work with Canadair's quality assurance department.

He still practiced sleights every day, performed regularly, and leapt
at the opportunity to spend a week in New York
at the home of Cardini (Richard Pitchford), the greatest of
the vaudevillian manipulators.

Cardini, whose talents many magicians say are inimitable, was retired
and nearing 80 when Romaine approached him for lessons in
the early 1970s. Cardini died a few years later.

Romaine's "Drunk Act" is inspired by, and a tribute to,
the tipsy routine that made Cardini a star on vaudeville
stages.

When Romaine retired from his "day job," five years ago,
he moved with his wife Joan to Kitchener and resolved
to resume performing full-time.

Now Romaine himself is one of the last living practitioners
of the vaudevillian routine Cardini created.

"He is the last living link to the golden era
of manipulation," says magician and comedian David Acer, who once
worked at the Montreal magic store where Romaine shopped. "He's
an icon in magic."

Elvay was a late bloomer in magic, having discovered it
while earning his Bachelor of Science degree at Dalhousie University
in his native Halifax.

He found a copy of The Royal Road to Card
Magic in a used bookstore and picked it up, unaware
at the time that the book has long been considered
the bible of sleight of hand.

Many late nights followed as he struggled to learn intricate
manoeuvres with names like The Riffle Shuffle, The Hindu Shuffle
and The Classic Force.

His time at teachers college was divided between studying education
and studying magic, so when he got a job teaching
high school, he had many tricks up his sleeve to
grab the attention of his students.

Though he enjoyed teaching, it didn't feel like his calling.
Six years ago, he made the "monumental decision" to pull
a vanishing act from Halifax and relocate to Kitchener --
close enough to Toronto to work there, but far enough
away to live comfortably.

"I always knew I needed to do something different with
my life," he says. "But I never knew what that
thing was until the magic bug bit me. And I've
never looked back."

*

It's neither a gasp nor a laugh, the sound made
in unison by a couple thousand people in Roy Thomson
Hall. It's something in between.

Whatever it is, it's exactly what Romaine wants to hear.

It's the reason he added the drunk schtick to his
sleight of hand routine decades ago.

The audience can relate to the drunken character, since he's
as confounded by the appearance of cards and billiard balls
as they are. The character is the victim of magic,
not the creator of it.

Romaine learned early in his career that audiences don't simply
want to be wowed by difficult sleight of hand manoeuvres.They
want to be entertained.

Elvay, too, knows this well. His biggest laugh/gasp from the
CNE crowd comes when he reveals the well-duh secret behind
a mysteriously levitating card (it's just attached to a stick
that the audience can't see head-on).

"You can do the world's greatest sleight of hand work,
but if you don't do it with any flair or
comedy, people will walk away after a few minutes," he
says.

"If you can amaze them and make them laugh at
the same time, that's showbiz. That's real magic."

chunter@therecord.com