It was 1979. I’d been fascinated by magic, theater, and the whole world of performing arts my entire life. I couldn’t get enough of it. I watched it on TV, I’d read books about it, I performed in “plays” with the local GingerBread Players group, and I even tried to find “live performers” as often as I could, not an easy task in 1970s north Alabama.
Magic effects are a much bigger world than you might imagine. A magician can read your mind, predict the future, make things appear, disappear, transform (bend, change color, get larger or smaller, multiply), or float. Imagination is really the only limit, but in the world of magic, at least to my 17-year-old mind, the most ubiquitously real magician, thing to do was “float someone in the air”… so I wanted to be a “real magician” I set a goal to make this happen.
Magic is an illusion. No one can defy the laws of nature. Take, for instance, gravity, a big-huge-unforgiving law of nature.
Stuff does NOT want to float in the air, it wants to fall to the ground!
A grown high school-aged human magic assistant person is generally 90 – 200 pounds, so I knew I needed to build a mechanism to create the illusion that I could “float” someone in the air.
Because I was a 17-year-old kid and had VERY VERY few resources to make this happen, I just assumed I could “figure it out”.
Ignorance is sometimes a blessing.
The first challenge I faced was this: I had no idea the “floating” illusion was generally done with thick steel bars or wires, the closest thing I could find at the local hardware store was iron plumber pipe, so I created a design to make “the magic happen” out of iron pipe, not sold iron bars.
The second challenge was that the pipe joints kept moving. There was no way it would support a human being with it moving all over the place, so I decided I needed someone to weld these joints.
Good plan!
I found a guy who lived way out in the county. He could weld it in his shop.
Excited I piled the pieces of plumbing pipe into the back of my little car and headed out.
I did not know it then, but my little Toyota Corolla station wagon would never be the same. It was a cold rainy rainy rainy slick day, and I’d never been to this guy’s house, so the roads were treacherous. Adding to this slickness of the road, I was pretty excited about getting this “thing” done! So I was excited and drove a bit too fast. Zipping along these cold slick county roads, I was surprised by a stop sign. Instinctively I braked, throwing my car into a skid, I shot off the side of the road, as mid-air the car twisted and turned.
It stopped turning when the rear window of my little station wag smashed into an unmoving telephone pole. I was unhurt, but I was not stuck in a ditch, and there was no passenger-side rear window, and the rear axle sounded like a “garbage truck dumping its load” all the time. I got towed out of the ditch, and dropped the parts off to be welded.
Now my car had a huge hole in it and a smashed-up rear axle, but it ran. So I waited for the “thing” to get welded and brought it safely back home.
Interesting side-note-about-humility – Unable to pay to repair my car, I drove it around with no side rear window (plastic taped over flapping in the wind) and it roared like a squeaky freight train for the entire next school year.
Back to floating a person. Somehow we (my co-conspirators and I) toted “the thing” up to the roof of the Bradshaw High School Auditorium.
We told no one. We figured it was probably better to apologize later if we got caught because the easiest answer (especially from people in authority) is ALWAYS… no.
We knew weren’t gonna hurt anything… we just wanted to take a cool picture. So we did.
by Steve Trash – Rockin’ Eco Hero
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