I'm a full-time professional magician and mentalist based in Minneapolis. I work corporate events, holiday celebrations and private gatherings — and I've never had another job.

The wrong box

My dad worked for a company that distributed movies, records and cassette tapes, which meant our house got things before anybody could buy them. So when a friend and I went digging through the closet where he kept them, we were looking for a movie.

We didn't find one. We found a two-box set with a magician named Steve Dacri on the cover — the tape in one box, the props in the other. We watched it, we learned a few tricks, and we started showing them to anyone who would stand still long enough.

The dinner table

The moment I actually remember is at my grandmother's house. My aunt and uncle, my grandparents, my parents, my cousins — all of them around the table. Nobody there thought of me as a magician. I didn't think of myself as one either. I had learned exactly one trick.

It was the salt shaker through the table. You push it down, and it goes through.

I got to the end of it and looked up, and every one of them had their mouth open.

Here is what I understood that night without having the words for it. I knew how it worked. I had practised it in my room. To me there was no mystery in it at all — I was a kid pressing on a salt shaker. But that is not where magic lives. It happens in somebody else's head, in what they do with what they think they just saw. I could only watch it land on them.

That is still the strangest part of this job. When I'm working something out, I honestly can't tell whether it is going to be extraordinary or nothing at all, because I'm the one person in the room it can never work on. The only way to find out is to look up.

I started magic at barely 10 years old, and I've been chasing that reaction ever since.

Being told no

Somewhere in those first couple of years I was told, more than once, that nobody makes a living doing this. The one that stuck came from inside my own house.

I've never had another job. Not one. I started getting paid to do magic at twelve — twenty dollars a show, at barn and garage parties around Maple Grove — and I have not done anything else for money since.

Finding out whether I was any good

My first competition was the Wizard of the North, at Mission Creek theme park in Hinckley, Minnesota, in July of 1989. I entered the beginner close-up category and won it. I was twelve, and some of the people I beat were adults.

Winning rearranged what I thought was possible. I could actually do this, and people who knew what they were looking at said so. At twelve that is not a small thing. Confidence is most of the job in this line of work, and that competition is where I got mine. Three more wins followed, through 1991.

I kept entering after that — Wizards Weekend in 1992, and again in 1993 — and came home with a certificate of participation both times. I don't remember minding. By then I was booking real shows and starting high school, and quitting competition wasn't a decision so much as a drift. My wife asked me to compete at a national convention this past July and I said no — not because I stopped caring, but because competition magic and working magic are two different crafts. Competitions are judged by magicians, largely on difficulty. My job is to make a room full of people who don't care how it's done forget themselves for a few minutes. I picked the second one.

Seventeen doves

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I got into doves. Real ones. At the peak there were seventeen of them living at my parents' house, which tells you more about my parents than it does about me. I haven't done a dove act since I was a teenager, though I still can't watch a good one without grinning.

The table a few seats over

Late nineties. I was working a Christmas party at The Minikahda Country Club in Minneapolis, Minnesota, doing close-up for a table of KARE 11 anchors. A few tables away a man watched the whole thing, waved me over, and asked me to do it again for his family. Then he asked for my card. He ran operations at the Metrodome.

That is how I became the official magician of the Minnesota Twins for six seasons — not from a pitch or an agent, but because somebody at the next table over was paying attention. Almost everything good that has happened in this career happened that way. I've never had a manager. These days my wife Christina handles nearly all of the bookings, and she is the reason clients tell me the whole thing was easy.

What I decided about a room

I don't swear. I don't use material anybody's grandmother would rather not hear. And I have never once gotten a laugh at the expense of the person helping me.

There is no single moment behind that. Across nearly forty years I have heard plenty of stories from clients who booked a comedian or a hypnotist or another magician who went too far. I have never once heard anybody say they wished the entertainment had been edgier.

I don't call it kid-friendly, because that puts the word kids into a room where there usually aren't any. What it is, is workplace-safe. There is nothing in my show that would be a problem in front of an employee, a client, a board member, or somebody's spouse.

And the spouse is the point. The person who gets offended is almost never the volunteer on stage — they said yes, they had a good time, they'll tell the story for years. It is someone three tables back who didn't sign up for anything. That is the real risk in booking entertainment, and it is the one I have built my act to remove.

What I'm actually hired for isn't the tricks. It's what happens after. A room of people who see each other once a year and have nothing to say to each other watch something impossible happen, and thirty seconds later they are arguing with each other about it. That is the part clients book me back for.

The first skeptic

A fair number of the rooms I walk into have somebody in them who has already decided this isn't going to be any good. Usually they saw a bad magician once. Sometimes they just think magic is for children. I have had committees push back on hiring me for exactly that reason, and I have watched those same people change their minds by the end of the night.

The man who told me nobody makes a living doing this was the first one. He lived to see me make a living at it anyway, and he was proud of me for it. He's gone now. I've spent nearly forty years changing the minds of people who came in certain — and he was the one who taught me it could be done.

If that’s the kind of night you want for your guests, send me your date. Christina will check whether it’s open, and if it is, she’ll put together a custom proposal for you.