The Seventh Strategy: Grab The Dialogue
THE SEVENTH STRATEGY: GRAB THE DIALOGUE
—Whoever plays offense first wins.
—Bill Clinton
Scene: This really happened. Like most sons, Harry Blackstone, Jr. imagines following in his father’s footsteps. Three decades before, the father, Harry Blackstone, Sr., made a borrowed handkerchief dance impossibly and mischievously alongside his audience’s imagination.
Now, it’s 1987. The son enters the stage to reach for a lightbulb in a lamp held by his lovely wife. It’s hot. He waits, cooling, and now almost magically removes the still-lite bulb and admits:
“Of course, it’s impossible … that’s why we do it.”
The bulb continues to burn brightly, alive again, in the magician’s hand, and now, this is the moment it begins slowly to float, never mind the small hoop Blackstone, Jr. passes around the lightbulb to prove there are no threads, no suspension, no tricks, and then:
“Just a moment, someone says they could not see it. Who was that? You? Well here….”
Blackstone, Jr., in control, breaks the proverbial 4th wall and walks into his transfixed audience and asks a lady, then a man, to hold the lightbulb, to look at it and, taking it back, it floats yet again …. now he walks back to the stage and turns: “But you … out in the far rows, you haven’t seen it yet, so look, but do not touch….” Blackstone seems to throw the magical lightbulb just over his audience’s heads: It’s flying now, outwards, into and well past the middle of his audience, it flies over to people in the back …. This is real magic …. And quickly, it boomerangs back to its magical owner, its master, its magician, again through that same small hoop and away from anything but pure magic. Blackstone has a kind of magical relationship with this brightly burning lightbulb.
A few magicians who watch this famous piece of magic think the father, Blackstone, Sr., must be looking down with pride upon his son, Blackstone, Jr. The son is not just performing a levitation, he’s doing something far bigger than a magical effect. In this theater, we all see the light and it somehow centers us. All the time, it ignites our hearts and our imaginations.
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