How I got in to Magic
People often ask me, “Maya, how did you get into magic?” And I know what they really mean is, “Maya, what’s wrong with you?” But when I tell them how it all started, they get it. And you will too.
I was back in Glasgow for my nephew’s wedding, badly jet-lagged, and it was the 12th of July. I was wearing a green jacket.
If you’re not from Glasgow, that sentence means nothing to you yet. If you are, you’ve probably already put your hands over your eyes and gone and hid behind the couch.
You see, the 12th of July is ‘Orange Walk’ day, where marching bands are out celebrating a three-hundred-year-old victory, and green is the other side’s colour. You don’t wear green on the 12th. No green. Or else! Glasgow’s weird like that, and normally I’d know better. But the jet lag had other ideas. I barely knew what century it was, never mind what day.
I heard the flutes and drums before I fully registered them. Then I turned a corner and the Orange Walk was coming straight at me, and I did the thing you don’t ever do. I walked straight through them. Wearing green.
What happened next happened fast. A hand with a miner’s grip grabbed my shoulder and pulled me clear, hauling me off the street and through a doorway as a steel shutter rattled down between me and the crowd outside. The drums muffled. My heart thumped. The light went grey. And a very old woman looked down at me, sat where I’d landed on her floor, and said, “What were you thinking?” Clearly, I hadn’t been. That was the whole problem.
The room I’d been dragged into was tiny and impossibly tall, a two-hundred-year-old shopfront. Every inch of it was stuffed with wigs, costumes, props and tricks stacked to a ceiling I could barely see. A glass counter full of playing cards, whoopee cushions and fake teeth, the packets faded from what little sunlight ever made it in here, everything dressed in decades of dust. And on the walls, photographs. Harry Houdini, standing in the very doorway I’d just been dragged through. Dai Vernon, with a personal message, written in his own hand. Tommy Wonder. Fay Presto.
I had been rescued into a magic shop.
I can’t really remember how, but there was tea. And somewhere over that tea I told Maureen, because that was her name, that I was home for a wedding, and that I would love to learn a magic trick to perform at it.
She looked at me for a moment, as though she was deciding if she could trust me. Then Maureen, who looked about as capable of generating excitement as a bus timetable, picked up a deck of cards.
I chose a card. She lost it in the deck. She found it again, fair enough, that’s the trick, I thought. Then every card in the deck turned into my card. Then they all turned back, and mine was gone, properly gone, and she let me sit with that for a second before she nodded at the cup of tea in my hand.
My card was under the cup. The tea she’d made me. The cup I’d been holding the whole time.
Thirty seconds, start to finish. I was floored.
I went back the next week. And the week after that. Six Tuesdays, or thereabouts, of learning that one trick properly, the moves, the timing, the patter, all of it, from a woman who corrected me like I had personally offended her.
On the sixth week, Maureen said she had something to tell me. I remember bracing for it.
“You better come through,” she said to no one.
A door opened, and Maureen walked through from the back of the shop.
Another Maureen. A second Maureen. Identical. My brain, faced with two old women where there should have been only one, did not reach for the obvious answer. It reached for… oh, right, Magic Maureen has cloned herself. Fine. Brilliant actually. I love that for her. No notes.
Turns out the explanation was way simpler than that. Twins. Maureen and her sister Agnes were identical twins, and they’d been tag-teaming me from behind that counter for the past six weeks, and I hadn’t clocked it once. It was my first big lesson.
By the day of the wedding, I knew exactly one trick, cold. So that’s what I did, all night, at every table, over and over again. Because every time I got to the end, someone grabbed my arm and said, ‘Do that again!‘ So I did.
Maya Lynch is an Auckland magician, mentalist and artist. With backing from the Creative Communities Scheme, she created a community magic show performed inside working laundromats, and performs close-up magic and mentalism at weddings, work functions, trade shows and private parties across Tāmaki Makaurau.
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