Episode 7: It's ILLUSIONIST, Dad...

Today is Sept. 1, 2009 and I am less than 48 hours away from becoming a former newspaper reporter. Hopefully, less than 48 hours away from walking out of the Lynn Item newsroom for the last time ever as a full-time employee, and hopefully 48 hours away from never having to have the following exchange again.

Random person :'What do you do for work?”
Me: “I am a newspaper reporter during the day.”
Random Person: “Ohhhhh that is so cool!”
Me: “Everyone thinks that but its really...(cut off)”
Random Person: “You know what you should write about... (insert irritating cause here – popular choices include teens overdosing on Oxycontin and problems with the public schools)

As I have briefly discussed with earlier examples, I have covered a lot of shitty stories and even shittier people since I have been at the Item, but today in thinking back I remembered one of the worst interviews I have ever had to do, and I feel like I have to share it.

It actually happened about a year before I started working at the Item, when I was at my old job as a weekly community reporter in Malden working for a giant, evil, corporate newspaper company called CNC.

My primary job at this paper was to read the daily newspaper in town, steal story ideas and update them for when our paper came out on Wednesdays, but I also spent a lot of time, as I do here, writing really, really painful public interest feature stories about residents who think they are much more important than they actually are. (I think the most famous person ever from Malden was Gary Cherone. Former Van Halen front man and half of the acoustic pop duo Extreme, best known for their romantic hit 'More than Words').

Now, every feature story I have ever written has been painful in its own way. Like the time I had to write about a free community art class and arrived to find a nude model, which I was later forced to draw. But perhaps the most excruciating experience I can remember was with a magician from Malden who was trying to make a name for himself by doing table side tricks during the Friday night dinner rush at the Dockside Restaurant.

Much in the same way that I hate clowns, I also hate magicians, or illusionists, or whatever they prefer to be called. I hate David Copperfield and Chris Angel and David Blane. In fact, the only magician I have ever been able to tolerate is Gob Bluth. A fictional character from the long-canceled (unjustly) Fox sitcom Arrested Development. Gob Bluth was brilliantly played by Will Arnett as a parody of an unsuccessful David Copperfield-type magician who fails miserably at all of his tricks.

I don't remember his name off the top of my head, but I remember the Malden magician I interviewed to be much like Gob Bluth. Both men were consumed by the idea of becoming the greatest magician in the world, but the majority of the tricks they tried didn't exactly work out. That is to say, there were a lot of props that hit the floor, and a few card tricks that didn't make a lot of sense.

“Still, where'd the lighter fluid come from?”

I will never forget this interview. We met at the Dockside around 5 p.m. on a Friday so we could talk before he started “working.” He told me about his first magic kit and how he grew up learning about Houdini and all the other crap you'd expect to hear from a magician. Things didn't really start to get awkward until the customers came in.

Essentially this guy just walked over to the table and said 'do you want to see a trick?' No lie, I probably saw him guess the correct card about 60 percent of the time he did one of those 'take a card, any card' things. Not a good average for a magician. The worst, though, was when he would try to pull something out of his sleeve or from under his hat. He probably would have done better if he wasn't so clumsy, but he just kept fumbling around with everything and pissing off the customers.

I don't know what ever happened to this guy, but I haven't seen his name out and about in the local press, so I am guessing he is either still at the Dockside or maybe he is trying to get some jobs fooling children at birthday parties. I do remember that he bought like 50 copies of the paper from us when the story ran. Poor kid.

I will never forget how awkward that interview was and I promise no magicians at any of my daughter's birthday parties.

With one day left at the Item I am still fielding my fair share of 'oh man, its your last day soon," bullshit, but I have managed to spend the majority of my day frequenting a wide variety of convenience stores and sandwich shops.

Unfortunately, I have to go to Girls Incorporated this afternoon because some underprivileged kids are trying to save the environment by putting stickers on paper towel dispensers urging people to consume less paper.

I pointed out to the organizer (who said the stickers were NOT made of recycled paper) that they were essentially consuming more by doing that, but that got me little more than an attitude on the other end of the phone.

Potential update to follow...