"Write a word on the back of this business card," the magician Steve
 Cohen asked me. I chose a word, wrote it down and folded the business
 card twice.

Next, Cohen asked me to open an imaginary dictionary and "read" to myself
 the "definition" of my word. And then he said, "The definition of your
 word is `a time by which all work must be completed,' so the word you
 chose is `Deadline.'"

Oh, it's a trick, right? He must have seen me write "deadline" on the
 business card, right? Maybe, but how did he also know that the exact
 words "a time by which all work must be completed" had just gone through
 my head?

Whoa.

OK, here we go again, another newspaper story about another supposedly
 great magician. Hey, I hate reading them, too. As a reader, I'm always
 convinced that if I had been in the room, I would've figured out what
 the magician was doing.

Well, this time I WAS the guy in the room. And this time, dear reader,
 you will have to accept the unacceptable: Steve Cohen does things that
 you simply can not believe.

Knowing that most people think of magic as something for kids or, worse,
 something for street hustlers, Cohen show, "Chamber Magic," models
 itself on the close-up conjuring done by self-declared wizards in the
 salons of 19th-century Europe.

"I'm not just selling the individual feats, but this entire tradition of
 going to a fashionable parlor to be entertained and amazed," said the
 30-year-old Cohen, who will be performing next month at the Waldorf
 Towers (info at www.customagic.com).

Unlike the hokey hacks with rainbow suspenders, the guys wearing capes
 and going "Mwah-aah-aah!" all the time or the big names like David
 Copperfield, when you watch Cohen, it's easy to lose yourself in the
 fantasy that you are watching a man with genuine occult powers, someone
 who can actually make cards dematerialize from a tabletop and
 rematerialize in a sealed envelope in his pocket.

Rationally, of course, you know that if a man actually had such power, he
 would use it to transfer millions into his bank account or get elected
 king of the world, not simply to entertain swells in a well-appointed
 parlor. 

Yet the fantasy persists.

One of my favorite bits is when Cohen distributes a dozen books --
 everything from fiction to books on child development -- and asks
 audience members to pick random paragraphs. And then he goes around the
 room and recites each person's paragraph.

As a skeptic, I just assumed that Cohen can simply memorize every page he
 sees. So when I encountered this quirky conjurer again, I brought along
 my own book (I'm re-reading "The Great Gatsby" -- I know, I know, but
 hey I didn't understand it in 10th grade).

Cohen, undeterred by the previously unseen book, asked me to think of a
 page and then pick two numbers between 1 and 20 (I picked 8 and 15).

"OK, I'll tell you the eighth word on the 15th line of the page you're
 thinking of," he said.

"Page 89," I said.

"Brewer," he said.

We flipped to page 89. The eighth word on the 15th line was, indeed,
 brewer.

Whoa.

For his next trick, Cohen showed me a Xerox copy of his hand and then
 folded it up and put it in a wallet. Next, I picked a card out of a
 standard deck (the 10 of spades -- not that I let him know!) and
 re-shuffled the deck myself.

"Most magicians like to control the deck," Cohen said. "But letting the
 volunteer shuffle it is a nice touch."

Cohen then pulled out five cards (one of which was mine, of course) and
 told me to place all five on top of the wallet and push down with my
 finger. When I picked up the cards again, there were only four, so I
 opened the billfold and, sure enough, my card was inside, right on top
 of the folded up Xerox.

Even for mere sleight of hand, that's pretty good. But like they say on
 the Ginsu commercials, wait, there's more. 

Next, Cohen unfolded the Xerox. And in the center -- where the hand on
 the copy paper had been empty minutes earlier -- the 10 of spades had
 somehow been Xeroxed onto the paper.

Whoa.

--30--

email: gershny@yahoo.com