My First Fire Magic Act

My grandfather started teaching me magic when I was eight. During the summers, I would visit him at his house in Culver City, California. It was there he had his "Closet of Magic". In this closet were all of his magic tricks. I was not allowed to look at anything on the top shelf, for that contained the forbidden cigarette magic. He passed away when I was 16, and I inherited all of his magic tricks.

I was now able to go through the cigarette tricks and see what secrets I had not been allowed to look at. Going through these various ancient tricks that my grandfather had performed when he was a young man, I found one that caught my eye. This trick had been created in the early 1900’s. It was a pantomime trick that involved the rolling of a cigarette.

After giving the instructions a quick review, I decided that this would be no problem. "What could go wrong", I exclaimed. I promptly invited over a few friends to see me perform my latest trick - completely ignoring Magicians Rule #2, "Always practice before performing".

My friends arrived and took seats on the couch. Standing before them, I pulled out an invisible rolling paper. Then I pulled out an invisible bag of cigarette tobacco. After pouring some of the Invisible tobacco onto the rolling paper, I closed the draw-string bag (that held the invisible tobacco) by pulling on the invisible string with my teeth, just like the directions said I should. It was about the time that I was licking the invisible paper and rolling an invisible cigarette, that I found out that my friends thought I was rolling a joint. This was the ‘70s (I was very naive). The chucking started.

I placed the invisible cigarette in my mouth and pulled out a real box of matches. I opened the matchbox and removed a single wooden matchstick. Upon lighting the match, I discovered that the 50+ year old match was rather dry. This became evident when the entire length of the match was instantly on fire. But this did not deter me!

According to the instructions, I was to cup my hands around the match and light the invisible cigarette, much like a person lighting up in the wind. Then, when I removed my hands I was to have a real lit cigarette in my mouth!

What actually happened was this. I cupped my hands around this mini-torch and started to bring it toward my face. It was then that I realized that I had never lit a cigarette before. I had no idea how to do this, but the show must go on. Under cover of the cupped hands, I secretly slipped a real cigarette in my mouth and tried to light it. The smell of burnt hair filled the room, as I dropped everything and started patting my face out because I was on fire! My friends were now rolling on the floor with laughter, as I watched with no eyebrows and no eyelashes.

Lucky for me all that was damaged was hair and my pride, but I never forgot Magician’s Rule #2 again.