Jeff McBlog

This time of year we often have visiting teachers and magical friends stay with us when they are performing in Las Vegas or teaching at the Magic School. Yesterday, Max Maven was here at our home. Max took us to see Michael Close and Vinny Favorito in a new comedy show at Binion’s Horseshoe… a very funny show! Having Max in the home is great fun, I can easily learn more in an evening of conversation with Max than a month of reading books on mentalism and magic! As the evening progressed Max moved through all types of intellectual terrain, covering diverse subjects from gospel music to wrestling to kabuki theater, underground comics to physics, and always bring the main point back to the performance of fine magic.

Hope you’ve had a magical Halloween. It’s actually one of my favorite holidays, being the mask man I am. One of my favorite memories was when I was eight years old, dressing up like my childhood hero, Lon Chaney in The Wolfman, complete with an “over the head”, Don Post official wolfman mask, and gardener’s gloves that I had glued fur and fingernails onto. I would prowl the neighborhood in the pre- and post-Halloween season, gearing up my wolfman-ness (actually more like wolfboy-ness). Inside I was a ferocious wolf-dude, lurking in the shadows, often banging on my neighbors windows and striking frightening poses while they watched TV. To my dismay, no one seemed very alarmed when they turned from the tube and saw a pint-sized wolf-boy. I could almost hear them saying “Oh that McBride kid’s at it again; maybe we better start locking the gate.” Anyway, these early escapades very well might have been the early stirring of my career in mask magic that eventually led me to Las Vegas.