Magic tricks, no matter how young or old you are they never fail to amaze us, we settle back looking diligently at a magician's hands hoping to catch the trick, but more often than not we are left without answers and only with amazement. Capturing amazement from the audience is what Las Vegas Magician Mac King has done over the past 16 years at the comedy-show at Harrah's.
Recently we caught up with Mac King to go a little more in-depth about his career, from his start in the magic industry to how he severed his finger. Sit back and join us as we learn about Magician Mac King.
So, who influenced Mac King to become a magician? King attributes primarily his grandfather(an amateur magician) as the person who influenced his curiosity in the art, he recalls being amazed by a trick and when would ask how it was done his grandfather would point towards a stack of books and say, "It's in one of those".
Moving forward a few years King noticed in that an incredible amount of open mic clubs where opening around New York and most importantly around Minneapolis and St. Paul where he was currently going to college. One gig led to another and Mac King knew that maybe just maybe this could work. After a briefly living in Los Angeles, King decided that his travels were becoming a little too much for him to handle, therefore Mac King and his wife, along with a little push by their friends would move to Las Vegas, Nevada.
Although hesitant about the move, King soon realized that a large number of clubs within his area alone would give him the opportunity to not just make a living but eliminate to a certain extent all his traveling.
The love of the audience and their reaction, for most performers no matter what their talent, more often than not this is what keeps them coming back. For Mac King, it's no different. Gaps in his schedule tend to bring him down, according to King when people begin to notice his slumping stance and dead look, they automatically know that he hasn't been on stage in a while.
"I crave the response", says King. However, sometimes the excitement of being on stage doesn't exactly pan well for King. In the 80's King was on stage performing the early stages of his incredible rope trick, according to King his focus was just on the audience and that's not a good place to have your focus when you're wielding a large pair of scissors.
As he began his rope-cutting Mac suddenly stopped and looked down, there he saw his thumbnail and some skin hanging by a thread. Speaking about staying focused, Mac King recently worked with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on a PBS project, so what do a magician and an astrophysicist have in common?
The urge to learn about human tendencies, this came in the form of the goldfish experiment where a group of people would see King conduct a trick, in turn, cameras would help capture their eye patterns to determine if King's "Look here, look there" tactic actually influenced people.
"I don't know if it's true, but they wrote a book about it," King says. What was proven is the newly build friendship between himself and Neil deGrasse Tyson.