My 2022 Trip to Las Vegas
Every couple of years, magicians flock from around the world to Las Vegas to be together at one of the world’s biggest magic conventions, Magic Live. I first attended this conference in 2013, and it was one of the best trips I had taken. This year, I went again, and it was even more fun than I remembered (not being a 17 year old kid in a Las Vegas casino probably helped).
Me, Stan Allen, and my friend Paul at the Magic Live welcome party. Stan Allen is the man who puts on this convention—the whole week is only possible because of him.
I traveled with a couple of my closest friends, Paul and Richard, two other members of Arkansas’ Masters of Illusion—we love performing together, and we knew we’d have a blast traveling together to sit in the audience for a change. Each day at the convention was jam-packed with lectures, inspiring talks, jam sessions, interviews, and some of the very best magic shows we’ve seen. I had such a blast being inspired by some of my heroes, meeting some magic friends in person, and just being around a thousand people who share the same passions as me.
And as fun as all that is, most magicians who attend will tell you that the best part of the convention isn’t on the schedule at all. At Magic Live, the magic doesn’t stop after all the scheduled events have ended. Downstairs, there’s a little bar called the Mardi Gras Bar, and every night, you’d find it filled with all kinds of magicians—these are people whose work I’ve studied since I was a teenager, headlining stars in Las Vegas, random people who no one has heard of but who can blow your mind with their skills and ideas. And every night, they’d all be hanging out, laughing, sharing, and collaborating until early hours of the morning.
And it’s this aspect of the convention—the friendships, the socializing, the nerdy, passionate weirdness of being together with these people—that makes Magic Live so special. I attended with my friends Paul and Richard, and had so much fun hanging out with them and attending all the events. But I also was able to catch up with old friends, like Jason, a professional magician from New Jersey who I met when we were awkward little teenagers. Before Zoom was cool, he and I used to have online magic jam sessions when we were in high school. We hadn’t seen each other since Magic Live 2013, so it was so much fun to hang out, see shows, and share magic with each other in person.
I also made new friends, like the Costa Rica crew, who traveled together to Vegas and shared their passion, love, and happiness with everyone around them. One of my favorite parts of the entire week was hanging out with these new friends in the Mardi Gras Bar, teaching each other some new magic, then challenging each other to show what we just learned to a stranger, then losing our minds when it actually worked (and laughing our asses off when it didn’t).
Since the convention was so eventful, and I didn’t want to miss a second of the fun, we really didn’t venture outside the hotel / convention center very often. But we did make some time to see a few shows while we were in town. The first was David Copperfield, arguably one of the most well-known and most influential magicians of our time. We sat just a few feet from the stage as Copperfield made motorcycles, full size cars, and a giant spaceship appear just feet from our faces. We also saw two of my favorite magicians, Penn & Teller, who spent the entire pandemic writing brand new material for their show, so despite having seen them a couple times before, almost everything in their show was brand new to me.
Finally, we saw a juggler named Jeff Civillico, and naturally, I invited my friend Noah, a professional juggler who lives in Las Vegas and performs at Ceasar’s Palace. One of Jeff’s first bits on stage is to bring someone on stage who can maybe juggle 3 balls (he says there’s usually one or two in every audience). He happened to pull up Noah, having no knowledge he was now standing next to another professional and very technically-skilled juggler. He asked Noah to demonstrate his 3 ball juggling prowess, and was surprised at how cleanly Noah handled this simple trick, and throwing in some technically difficult moves before wrapping up and trying to hand the balls back to Jeff. Noah’s a humble guy and did not want to upstage the guy we all paid to see, but Jeff, recognizing his above-average skill, pushed him to keep going and even took Noah’s front row seat next to me saying “no you go right ahead, this is way better than what I was going to do.” Before we know it, Noah is juggling 5 balls, doing pirouettes, and putting on a short show of his own, and Jeff is losing his mind (in a good way) at how his show has started off. With this great coincidence, Jeff improvises and cuts his original bit to do a bit of pass juggling with Noah. So now, we’re all watching Noah (who, might I remind you, had only intended to see a show, not participate in one) and Jeff pass six clubs across the stage, doing complex tricks, even passing clubs around a brave audience member. Meanwhile, I’m DYING laughing in my seat at what has unfolded before me—watching my friend get pulled onstage and blowing the audience away with his unexpected skill was so fun to watch!
In all, the trip was a great success, full of so much learning, so many memories, and so little sleep. I’m happy I could spend time with old friends, make a bunch of new ones, and spend a week doing/sharing/enjoying what I love at Magic Live.
