"Third Monday" is just like any other club, really. "Every time we come here, there's weird shit on Don's table," Francis Menotti jokes. "There'll be like a voodoo head or a chicken foot," he says, as he examines an odd wooden egg, apparently a French tool used to fix holes in socks.
It only seems right that the many visitors who come to Don Camp's West Philadelphia home every month are as distinctive from each other as the collectibles on his table. An unusual group of friends congregates at Monday's colloquium. Don, the gathering's host, strikes a regal pose, his distinguished face aged years beyond Francis' boyish features. Kevin Bethea slouches in a chair next to him and looks outfitted -- in his baggy sweatpants, sweatshirt and EA Sports baseball cap -- for an athletic event, while Larry Reichlin, who sits across from him with professorial posture, delicately dabs his neatly trimmed, gray mustache with a napkin after finishing a slice of cold pizza. The only thing, in fact, that any of these men share in common is the constant shuffling of playing cards.
It's easy to forget that these friends have not assembled to watch Monday Night Football or take refuge from their wives in a game of poker. In fact, they use their cards for very different ends. These guys are, to some, local celebrities, and to others, mysteries shrouded in folklore. They are Philadelphia's finest practicing magicians.
***
Six months before Francis, 28, graduated from Penn State in 1999, he broke the news to his family: although he had majored in Public Relations and minored in Psychology, Francis had decided, with some trepidation, to pursue a career as a full-time magician. Full-time means no odd jobs on the side -- you're living gig-to-gig, day-to-day, at the mercy of children's birthday parties and corporate banquets.
"I started in magic when I was five years old," Francis explains. "My parents got me a Fisher-Price magic set -- really just a hokey black, plastic box with three different colored doors and a wand with a fake flower in it that shoots out." The set, 23 years later, sits on Francis' bookcase among various other magic mementoes -- including his "Genii" award, a prestigious honor granted to him by the Society of American Magicians.
The little black box was a lot more to Francis than a kid's toy. "For me," he says, "it was my first attempt at accomplishing the impossible. Since then, I've discovered that magic's not necessarily about fooling people or even convincing them that magic is real." He speaks as though he has rehearsed his words to himself many times, and in fact, he later admits, "that was all part of my show's script."
Francis knew he had found his calling when, at age 12, he read Bobo's Modern Coin Magic, the magician's bible of coin trickery. "I fell in love with it, and I'm looking back at it now, and I think, 'Wow, that's really a dry read for a sixth-grader,'" he laughs. "I was so enthralled with it. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. From that point on, I had coins palmed day and night. I had coins everywhere," he remembers.
But Francis' opportunities as a young magician were limited. He had never shared his passion with other magicians or belonged to a community of like-minded friends -- that is, until he arrived at Penn State and met Randy Shine.
+++
Francis and Randy sit across from each other in Francis' South Philadelphia apartment. The two reminisce about their days at Penn State, often forgetting that they are not alone in the small living room. "We got to hang out with some very cool people," Francis says to Randy. "Oh yeah, the tailgates with the Supreme Court Justices?" Randy remembers. "Rehnquist, Rehnquist was at one," Francis recalls excitedly. "He saw me do an act and afterwards was like, 'Hey, I like your act.'"
As a graduate student at Penn State, Randy, 36, would have never befriended Francis (then a sophomore in college), had it not been for magic. Randy lived with an amateur magician, who introduced him to Francis and some of his friends. It was "the big bang of magic for me," Randy recalls. "It really all happened for me in one week."
It also happened that Penn State's president, Graham Spanier, was quite the magic enthusiast. When Francis and Randy discovered Spanier's interest, they petitioned the university for funding and co-founded, with some other friends, the Penn State Performing Magicians, an official club advised by the president himself. "Basically, we got a blank check," Randy remembers. "We went to magic conventions on a dime of the university. It was beautiful, beautiful."
The two friends make an odd, yet complementary pair and have something of a fraternal relationship. "My role in the world is to say, 'So, you believe in this? Why? .... I like to ask the uncomfortable questions," Francis says. When Randy speaks, in stark contrast, he assiduously corrects himself if he slips and says "God" instead of "gosh."
Maybe the two are just drawn to contradiction. They often debate, in between shuffles, matters of politics, science and religion. "Intelligent Design is the most arrogant theorem out there," Francis challenges Randy. Randy laughs as Francis continues his tirade for the next 10 minutes -- taking no offense at Francis' frank position. The conversation undulates with no logical focus, as the two forget that they are supposed to be talking magic. "Do you think Bush and Condoleezza have something going on?" Randy asks Francis at one point. His blunt response: "No, because she's mildly black."
If Francis and Randy's friendship is any indication, magic is an indiscriminating business. Age and race, politics and interests, have no bearing on a magician's handle of a deck of cards. It is for the shared love of magic that Francis and Randy, and a handful of others, have created a subculture unknown to most Philadelphians.
+++
One of the most senior members of Philadelphia's magic contingent is Marc DeSouza, who some call the "Godfather of Magic." A performer since the age of eight, Marc took a serious interest in sleight-of-hand magic when he was only 12 years old. Since then, Marc has won three national titles from the Society of American Magicians and a first-place award in close-up magic from the International Brotherhood of Magicians. The author of DeSouza's Deceptions and the creator of four instructional videos, Marc really is king of the Philadelphia Magic Mob. As one friend of Marc's observes, "When somebody needs something here, they call [Marc]." He makes it happen.
Marc lives in a suburb of Philadelphia with his wife and two-year-old son in an attractive, modern house which he designed himself. (He is the Senior Vice President of DeSouza Brown, Inc., a real estate development, construction and management company.) "It's a normal house upstairs," Marc says, as he greets some friends in the entryway of his home's basement. By "normal," Marc is referring to the contrasting character of the downstairs -- where he houses a museum of magic history and a state-of-the-art, 32-seat theater.
Marc's basement is nothing short of a magic Mecca, the magician's equivalent to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. The entire room functions as a glorified display case; even the front coat rack hangs the classic "Chinese Linking Rings" on its every spoke. Marc points to an original 1817 Rogers Group sculpture called "The Traveling Magician," explaining that almost every object or print in the room is an original. The wall artwork creates a tapestry of magic lore, displaying such vintage prints as Penn and Teller's show advertisement, "L'art Secret des Illusionists." The only wall, in fact, not devoted to magic is one in the front of the room where Marc hangs his array of collector guitars, many of them signed by the likes of the Velvet Underground (the "original group," he makes certain to clarify), Eric Clapton and John Fogerty. Recessed in the back of the room is a place that has become indispensable to the livelihoods of Philadelphia magicians: Marc's theater.
Marc designed the theater "primarily ... as a learning space," he explains. "I created it really for myself as a rehearsal space, but then there are people I have coached to work through their material. I bring in the best magicians from all over the world to come and talk about magic and to share their creations."
Twenty magicians sit in the theater, waiting to watch a performance and lecture given by a San Francisco magician, Dorian Rhodell. "I'm trying to give magicians an opportunity to see great magic, to learn, to share. It's a space where they can do that, and that's a great thing," Marc says.
While a rehearsal space might seem unexceptional, in the magic world, community meeting is scarce. When Dorian takes the stage to begin his lecture on sleight-of-hand, he remarks, "You guys are really lucky to have something like this. Living in San Francisco, there is nothing going on in terms of the magic scene."
For outsiders like Dorian, Philadelphia is a very special place for magic. "Philadelphia magical history is so broad and so rich," Marc explains. "There were great magic shops years ago in Philadelphia ... among the best in the world," he adds. Both the Society of American Magicians and the International Brotherhood of Magicians founded their early chapters in Philadelphia. But what makes Philadelphia so unique now is something quite different from its past prestige, something of which Marc, Francis and Randy are all very much a part. "I think in more recent years," Marc muses, "there are two kinds of defining things that have kind of pulled the [Philadelphia] magical community together.... One of them is the stuff I've been sponsoring," and the other, he explains, is "Third Monday Magic."
+++
"It was Third Monday Magic that really brought us together," Marc says of his friendship with Francis and Randy. The three magicians had met years earlier at a magic lecture series hosted by Muhlenburg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. But it was their repeated interactions at Third Monday that made them not only friends, but colleagues. For an industry that lacks any centralized base, Third Monday has provided an office, so to speak, for local magicians.
"I'll be completely arrogant right now," Francis confesses. "Third Monday Magic is the best group of magicians on the East Coast." The Third Monday Magic club owes its existence to a local Philadelphian and award-winning photographer and journalist, Don Camp. Every third Monday of the month, 10 magicians gather at Don's West Philadelphia house to discuss magic. "The concept alone has changed magic in Philadelphia," Marc says. "There are people who know about Third Monday, who have never been there, but know what it's about. There are people in other cities that all of us talk to who say, 'My God, I wish we could have this.'"
Originally conceived as a forum exclusively to recognize black magicians (one such member, Chris Capehart, jokes, "There are very few of me in this business"), Third Monday held its first meeting in 2000. But in the interest of recruiting more participants, the club decided to open its door to anyone. Randy kids that Francis broke the color line. "I told you, he's my brother from another mother. Seriously," Randy says.
Third Monday tries to facilitate "a different way of thinking about magic, about sharing and sort of conceptualizing magic differently. It's more than just a bunch of tricks," Marc explains. In magic, the trick is the given, and the delivery is the art. "It all comes down to an intellectual understanding of what art is about," Don says to his fellow club members. "You learn to speak with the camera, with the brush. You can also speak with magic. Simply learning a trick from the box is not art."
For Don and his friends, good magic transcends its obvious facility to "trick" people. Anyone can purchase a trick on the Internet or study instructions from a book. "The concept of fooling the audience should go without saying .... So once you've accomplished that, now work on presentation. That's what makes it a good piece of magic, because the presentation oftentimes is as magical, if not more magical, than the trick itself," Francis explains.
But to many people, magic is still only about the trick. "Magic is so easy to fake," Francis laments. So many people learn how to vanish one coin and then call themselves magicians. "I don't award those kind of people the title magician," he remarks. "They're people who do tricks -- how about let's just shorten it to 'whores,' because that's what they're doing. They're turning tricks."
+++
It's the phony magicians, the cheesy impersonators, the embarrassing caricatures, who lend magic its skewed reputation. While musicians can escape being written off after one bad performance (there are always more and better bands out there), magicians are not so lucky. "You see a shitty magician the first time, and you're like, 'So that's what it's all about,'" Francis says.
Part of the problem, Francis theorizes, is that people do not respond well to being made to feel inferior. "If any magician were to study Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, they could improve their act like a hundredfold, because all of a sudden it becomes about the other person," he explains. "That's why so many people, I think, hate magicians, because it's about, 'Look at me, look what I can do. I can do this!'"
Francis and many of his friends certainly recognize that for most people, magic is still not an art form and is, at best, play for children. Francis admits that performing for a skeptical audience is like "fighting an uphill battle .... It's like emptying the ocean with a spoon," he says. Randy, on the other hand, is less willing to concede to popular opinion. He offers a challenge to any magic cynics out there: "invite us over tomorrow to perform, invite us over tomorrow"
