Are you the kind of person who gets anxious before parties? Because you’re worried the cheese you picked is dumb? Or your sweater is patently ridiculous? Or because you have the sneaking suspicion that you just aren’t very interesting? Because it’s hard to come up with a single thing to talk about that you are not pathologically bored by hearing yourself say? And the idea of seeing that fact registered in the eyes of another human being while standing over your baked Brie—which is, in fact, a dumb cheese, God how could you have served it—is too much to bear?
Well, don’t worry. This is normal. Social anxiety is one of the best reasons to never leave your home or let anyone else inside it. It’s enough to make you never want to throw a party. But if you have to anyway, one thing you can do is hire a magician.
Because one thing a party magician promises is to make the burden of being interesting … disappear. In this case by reading people’s minds and performing tricks of impossible memory and telepathy. Which are among the feats of wonder that Vinny DePonto performed when I hired him to entertain at my wife’s birthday party a few months ago.
You probably have some questions. Like: You hired a magician? Or: Was it awkward? Or maybe: Wait, whyyyyy? It’s because my wife turned 50 this year, and she wanted a magician. Actually, she either wanted a magician or a murder mystery, but the idea of spending dinner with a troupe of actors from rural Massachusetts (where the party was) with floppy hair and bad breath felt like sort of a nonstarter.
There was also the added pressure that my wife cries three out of every five birthdays. I don’t mean tears of joy. It took me longer to realize this than it should have, the way it takes a person who walks into a wall again and again too long to realize that a wall is not, in fact, a door. Birthdays are hard for her. I think she saves up all the feelings of worthlessness that I like to mete out at various parties throughout the year and spends it all on just this single date—she is a splurger by nature. My son’s the same way on his birthday. The burden of expectations and the disappointment in the normalness of life is genetic, I guess.
But would a magician do the trick (as it were)? There was only one way to find out (and to make sure that if she cried it wasn’t my fault). I’d bring in the same magician who performs at M. Night Shyamalan’s Halloween parties. Who has also worked for the Knicks, Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Garfield, Neil Patrick Harris, and J. J. Abrams. My gamble was that a man I could not really afford could solve my problems with little more than a deck of cards and a small pad of paper.
One thing a party magician promises is to make the burden of being interesting … disappear.
On the night of the party, DePonto rode through the front door of the Inn at Kenmore Hall on a breath of cold air heaved from the frozen Berkshire ground (it was still winter), eyes twinkling, cheeks flushed. He is small, with a lineless face, the son of a sandwich bread delivery man from the bedroom town of Dobbs Ferry, New York. There’s a certain Benjamin Button quality to him. A mild-mannered Rumpelstiltskinism. We had about 20 guests, and none of them really noticed as he moved through cocktail hour and into a back room to prepare. (That was stipulated in his contract—a private room. What he prepared I cannot tell you. I was not allowed in.)
He re-emerged, in character. He slipped into the crowd, where he began to perpetrate a series of parlor tricks. I believe this part of his show is what’s known as “close magic.” A strange kind of participatory seduction where you meet someone who openly wants to trick you, and you, at once, try make sure he doesn’t get away with it while hoping that somehow he will.
DePonto was charming and intimate but also unknowable and slippery. He seemed by turns like a friend you kind of knew and someone you should never let into your house. He was basically one Hercule Poirot mustache short of an Agatha Christie character. If only someone would drop dead into their winter-root-vegetable purée at dinner, my wife would get the murder mystery and the magician in a single night, and I could retire in the birthday-party Hall of Fame.
But over the course of the next half-hour or so, DePonto began to turn the crowd. Converted us one by one. He’d approach a group of people and introduce himself. He said to my son, Finn: Think of a word. Write it on this piece of paper. Now fold it and put it in your pocket. Now think of the word and send it to me in a thought message. And then a few minutes later he announced that the word was “cardinal,” and Finn unfolded that piece of paper to reveal it was exactly that. Another time he told my friend Evyn to think of a shape, then write the name for that shape in her mind. And while she was doing that he remarked that it was strange, because most people don’t write the word “circle” in cursive. Evyn gasped. Other people gasped. If I were French I’d call it a frisson. And the frisson spiderwebbed through the room.
Here I have to stipulate two things: 1) DePonto is not, according to him, a “magician.” He is a “mentalist.” Because the tricks are different, and, I think, there’s still kind of a stigma to the word “magician,” the stink of old top hats and musty silk handkerchiefs and men stuffed into ill-fitting tuxedos who may or may not be the subject of restraining orders. And 2) this kind of magic is … trendy? Look, I’m not saying it has more Google searches than Sidney Sweeney or that people line up outside magic shops like they’re Supreme stores. But magic … is trendy.
“I moved to Brooklyn in 2011, and there were, like, 10 magicians in New York City,” DePonto said a few days after the party. “Now there are an endless amount. And they have variety shows—Ossy Magic, Speakeasy Magick.... You can’t shake a stick in New York and not hit a magician.” DePonto’s one-man show, Mindplay, just concluded a run in Washington, D.C., after completing a run at the Geffen Playhouse, in Los Angeles. Later this year he’ll be doing a show in New York City.
You can trace the trend to a decade or so ago, when a new generation began to make themselves in the image of the magicians’ magicians Penn & Teller. Men who took the idea of magic and removed the David Copperfield–ian hair and the spangly leotards and the David Blaine sense of Las Vegas spectacle and replaced it with a droll sense of humanity and a pleasantly underworld-y brain.
It went sort of mainstream about five years ago, when the monologuist and magician Derek DelGaudio’s Off Broadway show, In & of Itself, was made into a Hulu special directed by Frank Oz (the legendary director-performer-puppeteer who worked on the Muppets, Star Wars, etc.). DelGaudio and DePonto, who has been nominated for a Drama Desk Award, are contemporaries and among the best-known names in this world.
So yes, there is now excess demand in the world of high-end mentalism. People are lining up to pay DePonto thousands of dollars (he’s not a man who publishes his fees on his Web site) to come to their homes and trick their friends.
But the deeper question is: Why? Is it just one of those rich-people things that rich people do because in the arms race of richness you always have to be doing something your friends haven’t done? Is it a way to feel like you can make your party (and yourself) seem worthwhile without relying on the sheer force of personal charm and innovative cocktails?
Is it just the will to eventify something, to make it all seem like a night can matter, to give the lie to the truth that we’re all terminal cases who will bring with us nothing but the bodies we were born into when we enter the grave, not even our memories, which is a great theory if you’re writing in your journal as a freshman at Wesleyan but doesn’t really cut it as a theme for a 50th-birthday party?
As his performance drew to a close, DePonto gathered us together for his grand finale. There were three or four tricks. And they were good. So good that afterward, everyone spent a long time speculating about how they were even possible.
One was a trick where he took my friend Adam out of the room and asked him to whisper the name of a singer or musical artist to him while the rest of us waited. When they returned, DePonto sat my friend Chloe down across from Adam and had them practice communicating with each other just by thinking. “Think of one shape inside another shape,” he said. Adam said, “Wait, I tried it, but it might not be appropriate.” Everyone laughed. They tried again. Chloe thought of a circle inside a triangle. Adam thought of a triangle inside of a circle. DePonto said they were getting closer. Then he told Adam to think of the artist he’d whispered to DePonto. But Chloe wasn’t getting any messages.
DePonto re-settled her into her chair and told them to try again. We all waited. And then Chloe said, “Well that was weird.” DePonto asked what she meant, and she said she heard a song in her head. DePonto asked her what it was, and she said, “‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’” Adam started laughing. “Who was the artist you thought of?,” DePonto asked. And when Adam said “Judy Garland” … Let’s all ironically yell: “Frisson!”
My take here is you can come in a skeptic who thinks this whole idea is lame. But if you leave a skeptic who thinks this whole idea is lame, well, you’re probably an asshole.
“We know all the answers,” DePonto said later. “We live in an age of certainty. Having someone in your home who creates a bit of good mystery is important.”
Everything is pre-determined. Everything is googleable, and soon it’ll just be implanted by Elon Musk and OpenAI into our brains. And while those answers seem right, they are by nature reductive and limited and ignore the giant mystery of the universe itself, which is one cause of the psychic agitation of being alive in 2024. A feeling that can be summed up by how disappointed my son was when he went to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios, a couple of years ago. He was very excited about it. But he discovered when he got there that all the world had to offer by way of magic was a mini–roller coaster in a pre-fab castle.
But my wife was not similarly disappointed by Vinny DePonto. (She did cry. But it was later, during the tear-jerking parts of some very good birthday toasts.) Because what DePonto does by showing up at our parties is answer our prayers: Please, please, please show us we don’t know everything. And that’s what happens. Maybe it’s a trick. But synthetic magic is better than no magic at all.
Devin Friedman is a Los Angeles–based writer
