Houdini Festival in Danville VA

This weekend, November 1-2, 2013, Wayne Alan and The North Theatre in Danville VA will be hosting the first annual Houdini Festival. It's going to be a fun time and yours truly will be there on November 2nd lecturing and then later performing.

At 10:30am I will be doing a lecture on Escapes. I'll teach some methods used by Houdini and also some techniques by others. I'll be teaching methods to escape from Ropes and Handcuffs as well as some unusual escape methods.

At 8pm, there will be a Gala Evening Show and I will be doing my Steampunk Magic Act along with some escapes thrown into the mix. If you are in Southern Virginia, or perhaps the Northern part of North Carolina and have an interest in magic and Houdini, please come on out.

Click on the poster above to find out more about the festival!

I will have a full report of the Festival once it's over! 

In Search of Magician Statues

 The surprise success of the various Houdini Bust/Statue blogs has me interested in doing something similar with magician statues and busts. I know there are a lot of them out there. I actually have quite a few. The success of the Houdini Bust blogs was because many people submitted photos that I was unaware of and thus helped to really enhance the photo collection.

So I need your help. I'm looking for busts and sculptures and statues/figurines of magicians to include here. If at all possible, if you could also include some information on the statues such as who created them, where the statue came from, what it's made of, and things like that. IF you know that is, if you don't just send me the photo.

Unlike the Houdini blogs which continued over several days, I'd like to gather up as many of the magician statue images and then present them all at once, or least keep the blogs to just a couple. I already did a blog a while ago on large magic statues which can be seen here.

So if you have anything, please send to carnegiemagic@aol.com

Houdini and His Likeness

Courtesy of John Hinson, the Great Nephew of Houdini, we have another Houdini Bust. This time the Grand Daddy of them all. This bust was commissioned by Houdini in 1914 while he was performing in England. Sculptor John Cassidy created this amazing bronze bust.

This bronze bust was to be placed upon Houdini's grave when he died. However, a marble copy was mounted on the grave instead. Bess Houdini kept the bronze bust in her home and it was passed down to her sister when she died. The marble copy suffered a tragic end at the hands of vandals. But thankfully today, due to the efforts of Dorothy Dietrich and Dick Brooks a new Houdini Bust sits atop the grave.

In 1958, John A. Hinson donated the bronze bust to Museum of the City  of NY.