Magic

The theme of this last week was magic ✨.

I rewatched the first two movies of the Now You See Me franchise, since the new movie dropped on Friday & I want to go see it. I also went to my friend’s birthday celebration, which was a group of us going to a magic show in SF. It was such a creative idea.

The magic show was at a place called The Magic Patio in Bernal Heights. The guy, Andrew, who had put it on has been doing it for about 10 years. He started out doing it in the Mission on the patio of the apartment he was living at. Then, due to some city permit issues, ended up getting the space it is in now. He & his friends built the entire thing themselves. The theater seats about 50 & usually sells out. He designed it so the whole place still felt intimate… like a patio.

Now, you never know what to expect with these type of things, but he put on such a great show. He used to study engineering & had a big imagination as a kid, so those two things collided in doing magic. Since I myself, have an engineering degree & also a big imagination, I enjoyed this little detail. He took his passion & creativity & combined it with his engineering background to make this whole show come to life.

This all then reminded me of a story about magic from the Summer of 2024. I was at Old Town Ale House in downtown Chicago with my best friend of 21 years, Kayla. Throughout the day people kept telling us we had to go there. We were like okay we get the point... we’ll go. It’s a classic institution in Chicago. It has artwork covering all of the walls & it’s where a lot of the Second City people have hung out at over the years. Second City is an improv club in Chicago that has been a pipeline for SNL. Some of the people out of Second City are: Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Chris Farley, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, & the list goes on.

So we go.

When we get there, we were like this is a really cool spot but wasn't exactly our vibe for the night. So we have a drink & leave. But as we leave, this guy knocks on the window & starts waving us back in. He had to be mid-40's & he was with his friends, a married couple. They seemed inviting & everyone had been telling us we had to go here so we thought we might as well see why we were being called back in.

He had a deck of cards & was like “let me show you a magic trick”. We thought he was full of shit (& he kind of was) but nonetheless let him do the magic trick. He had asked me to pull a card & I already had a feeling what the card was going to be. It was going to be the Ace of Spades. I have that card tattooed on my left arm. It's the strongest card in the deck. So I pick the card & I smirk... because it was indeed the Ace of Spades. He does his trick & he got the card right. I then showed him my tattoo & I don't think he saw that one coming.

We left saying, “Okay… maybe that’s why everyone kept telling us to come here.”

Earlier this year my dad moved to the city & ends up living near Old Town Ale House. So he had been talking about it on the phone with me & I decided to look it up to learn more about it again. I then see in the 'About' section on their website that the owner was inspired by my favorite bar in SF, in the very neighborhood I live in… Vesuvio.

So is magic real? Is it just an illusion? Maybe we don’t need to ever know. & this is coming from someone whose favorite subject has been math all my life. I even have a tattoo of the delta symbol behind my ear because I loved calculus so much. Things have to add up. There has to be proof.

Or maybe we just need to sit our asses down & enjoy the show. Maybe we can just let the reason for things sometimes be… MAGIC.