For me, I was watching Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Orson Welles, Victor Fleming movies, and I said, "I want to tell stories like that. I want to move people like that. But I'm good at magic, so what am I going to do?" So I started using magic for the right reasons - to get the girl.

I'm inventing new principles. The audience has a point of view that no one can predict.

A few years later, when I was still going to these meetings, I was also "second-acting" every Broadway show [walking in with the crowd after intermission]. I snuck in to see Grease with John Travolta in kind of a secondary part and Adrienne Barbeau playing Rizzo, into Pippin, hung out with Ben Vereen and Bob Fosse. It was an amazing time for a teenager.

I had a point of view, which was different. I looked at magic as theater, as storytelling, and I tried to have an approach that was different from what they were doing. "How can I move people and really get them to dream with a card trick, with coin magic, or even a piece of stage magic?"

Later on, towards the end of their lives, I thanked her. I said, "Mom, you were really tough." She said, "I wasn't tough! I always believed in you."

Actually, I started as a ventriloquist and my music teacher said, "Why don't you emcee the talent show?" My act was out of the back of Boys' Life magazine-they had a whole series of jokes in the back of Boys' Life magazine for Boy Scouts. So my act was jokes with my ventriloquist figure, and it was really bad, but I walked into the classroom afterward and the kids went, "Wow, you're cool." I wasn't cool at all, but I thought, "Well, this is a pretty good deal."

Everyone was talking about having airplanes disappear. And I said, "Wait, wait, wait. That's what you like? I'd tell you a story about something like my girlfriend leaving me, and the magic was really hard. The airplane thing was comparatively easy, and people liked that thing?" I realized at that moment, the power of the simple idea.