Rick Jay si racconta

Sul sito NJ.COM una interessante intervista (in lingua inglese) a Rick Jay, in occasione dell’uscita del documentario “Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay”, in cui si parla di lui e della sua influenza nel mondo della magia.

The biggest disappearing act Ricky Jay ever pulled was himself.

Yes, there are still some facts you can pull out of a hat. He was born in 1948 in Brooklyn, and is perhaps the world’s best sleight-of-hand artist, particularly with cards. He has made movies, written books and played Broadway. A new documentary, “Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay,” opening Friday in New York, celebrates his imagination and his influences.

But he keeps his own history hidden behind the curtain, even from his closest friends — who admit to knowing little about his personal life and next to nothing about his childhood. He prefers it that way. When People magazine did one of the first big stories on him, more than a quarter of a century ago, they asked for the usual background.

“My father was the Formica King of Long Island,” he said, “and my mother was the daughter of a Bengal Lancer in India.”

And that was all he said about it, and he’s never said much more, even when interviewed for a typically exhaustive profile in the New Yorker. It is part of his first and greatest illusion: The Vanishing Boy. And yet, look closely, past the smoke and mirrors and misdirection, and you can still see traces of the facts, hidden away in old newspaper files and that false-bottomed cabinet called the internet.

Details of a kid named Ricky Potash, born in Brooklyn, moved to Elizabeth. A child who loved baseball and chess and was already starting to write, covering high school sports as a stringer for the Star-Ledger, serving as editor-in-chief of Thomas Jefferson High’s “The Quid,” a new literary magazine that, the school paper breathlessly announced in 1963, would feature “way out short stories.”

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