In high school, fashion was all she wanted to do, but that was also when she started picking up magic from her father. “I said, ‘You’re getting attention, I want attention — teach me a magic trick, Dad.’”
David Wax, a doctor in Chicago, where he and his wife raised their family, remembers teaching his daughter one of her first tricks at a party. By the time they left, she was performing the trick for other guests. “She has a lot of confidence,” Dr. Wax said, “and a great personality for performing.”
Soon after, he brought his daughter to a magic convention. “There are not a lot of cute little girls at magic conventions,” he said. “There’s mostly old guys, like me. So everybody wanted to meet her. She was the hit of the convention.”
They did a few gigs together, even got matching rabbit-in-a-top-hat tattoos, but it wasn’t until Ms. Wax moved to New York to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology that she started meeting more magicians and developing her own performance style.
“In high school,” she said, “when you’re just starting out, you see something like a cool trick with fire and you say to yourself, ‘I want to learn how to do that.’ But as you grow and form your performing persona, some of that gets peeled away. You realize, ‘Oh, that’s magic for somebody with face tattoos — that’s not me.’”
She doesn’t do serious comedy, she said, although “most of my magic is rooted in comedy.” For close-up sets, she prefers card tricks to coins. And when it comes to stage magic, she likes taking a classic premise and putting a personal twist on it. “It took me a long time to figure out what my schtick was,” she said.
For the first time since the pandemic, gigs have started coming back. The McKittrick Hotel and the Society of Conjurers and Magicians, or S.C.A.M., are two of Ms. Wax’s favorite places to perform. The S.C.A.M. shows give her the chance to do lots of sets for different audiences. “It helps you get better at material faster,” she said. “If you can work on a trick and do it five times back to back, for five different audiences, that tightens up way faster than an occasional gig.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
