It's an Illusion!

Copperfield brings his magic to Fort Worth's Bass Hall

Comments (0) By Merritt Martin Thursday, May 11 2006

So as I'm writing this I'm hearing staff writer Rick Kennedy extol the virtues of David Blaine and how he got the raw deal after Monday's television special Drowned Alive. "Dude, he had to get out of eight handcuffs! Everybody's all like, 'He was only in there for seven-something minutes,' but you try holding your breath for seven minutes—YOU'D DIE!" And for the week before that, I listened to my co-editor Noah Bailey reminiscing about the time he saw David Copperfield live. Regardless of the illusion anecdote, it always ends the same way: Noah gets this far-off look in his eye, stares for a bit and then ends with, "Then...he flew. He flew. Seriously. No ropes. The man flew."

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Magic, illusion, whatever you want to call it, the stuff seems to have this bizarre effect on people that normally subscribe to basic logic. It instills this childlike sense of wonder, this natural desire to defend even the most irrational stunts. It causes people who generally form plausible sentences to say things like, "Dude, really the only way he could have done that is if they embedded some sort of electromagnetic framework under the stage...but then I suppose they'd have to put up a warning for people with pacemakers, so that can't be it."

If you could use a little suspension of boring, logic-laden reality for a night—and I don't know about you, but I sure could—the man who flew, David Copperfield, takes the Bass Performance Hall stage for An Intimate Evening of Grand Illusion 8:30 p.m. Tuesday and 5:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. Wednesday. Tickets are $37.50 to $67.50. The hall is located at Fourth and Calhoun streets in Fort Worth. Call 1-877-212-4280 or visit basshall.com.
Tue., May 16, 8:30 p.m.; Wed., May 17, 5:30 & 8:30 p.m.