Word: magician
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first night as manager of the Charleston Club, which is a laundry for money amassed by a very violent mob. But Mike has other worries: "I've got a group who can't play music, one bad comedian plus boyfriend, a nervous breakdown calling himself a magician, two coachloads of 70-year-old ( religious maniacs looking for a fight, and a fancy-dress contest that nobody knew about." The fanatics are warring Irish Catholics and Protestants, a half-century's resentment festering between them. They spike their drinks with faith baiting and engage, Casablanca-style, in fierce simultaneous renditions...
...work, expanding his office, hiring a full-time researcher, and planning for a college scholarship so that more debunkers can be set to work. The Great Doubter has become a true believer in his benefactors: "They reached very far out, perhaps dangerously so, in giving it to a magician instead of some academic. I feel a great responsibility to the foundation...
Ronald Reagan has a genius for American occasions. He is a Prospero of American memories, a magician who carries a bright, ideal America like a holograph in his mind and projects its image in the air. This week the sky will be splashed with celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty. The President will hand out the sparklers, and the nation will gaudily salute the American dream. Reagan, master illusionist, is himself a kind of American dream. Looking at his genial, crinkly face prompts a sense of wonder: How does he pull...
...summer of 1976, Judkins, then a 19-year-old New Hampshire boy attending Haverford College, signed on as a cook with a circus bound for broke. Cooking led to a truck-driving job, then magician, then fire-eater ("It's just basic common sense. Heat rises. Keep the heat going up. Keep your mouth wet--and your mustache trimmed"), then sideshow manager, then ringmaster. Then the show went bankrupt. Judkins' last task, in December 1977, was to return an elephant leased from D.R. Miller. Hauling a rented trailer that the elephant was systematically reducing to bits, Judkins reached Hugo penniless...
...commission from undercutting the President's defense budget crusade. Indeed, a draft by Commission Member James Woolsey, who was Navy Under Secretary during the Carter Administration, vividly depicted Pentagon shortcomings. One passage, for instance, compared stewardship of the Pentagon to the story of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the master magician's young helper who learned how to start the magic but not how to stop it. But at the insistence of Reagan loyalists on the commission, the language was "dulled up" to sound more like a typical presidential commission's findings. Meanwhile, Reagan's speechwriters pre-emptively embraced the commission...