 Now, if I want to create the illusion of this disappearing, it's not too hard to do. And you see, the reason I fool you is that it never left this hand down here, you see. But the reason that I fool you with it is because I look where it's supposed to have gone. And I fold my hand as if I'm holding it there, and I'm adjusting my hand to it. But again, it never left this hand down here. But it's because of the psychological misdirection. Now that's a thing that magicians learn very early on. And as a kid, I learned that. And then I started to see this sort of thing being done on a psychological level, not sleight of hand like that necessarily, by some of the healers and the prophets and whatnot that were coming through Toronto at that time. I'd go to these meetings, I'd say, damn, that's what's in the book, you know? That's what I've been learning as I went along. There fooling the public the same way I do it for purposes of entertainment. So that was a great lesson to me right there. I found out that other people were doing this to take people's money illegitimately and dishonestly. So that was the big eye-opener. Oh, yes. Yes, that was a great revelation to me. Now I know that you prefer not to use the word magician. Why is that? Well, because magician by dictionary definition, it's loosely used in the United States. The better word is conjurer, or the real pronunciation is conjurer. A conjurer is one of the definitions and the one that I use is a person who uses the skills of misdirection and trickery to produce the effect of genuine miracles that could be done by a magician. And a magician by definition is someone who uses magical supernatural forces to create effects, to do things, to actually do real magic. And I don't recognize that there is any real magic. Maybe puppy dogs and Sophia Loren come close, but not quite close enough. So you went on from there and obviously you became a professional. Yeah, I met Harry Blackstone, a senior, the old man. I went, since I was not in school, I could, don't tell anybody please, but I could go and see matinees on Wednesday afternoons at the Casino Theater, which is a burlesque house. Yes, one of those things. And I saw shows that maybe I shouldn't have, but from the top balcony of the Cheap Seats. And I saw Harry Blackstone, senior, the old man. He came in there and he made a woman float up in the air. He stood there on the stage and he did this and she rose into the air, floated over his head and he passed a hoop around her. And then he gestured and she came back down to the couch in which she laid just a moment ago and he would in tone to the audience. You see this strong lady floating in the air. That's a pretty good imitation of his voice too. And I sat there astonished. I thought it's either hypnosis or it's a genuine miracle or it's a trick. Yeah. So I went backstage and I met Harry Blackstone. He was very, very good to me. He sort of took me under his wing and every time he would come around to the Casino Theater twice a year, I would get a little written invitation that there were seats waiting for me. And I would go down with a couple of my friends and I'll never forget Harry Blackstone. He was, and his son later who succeeded him in the act, of course, great man and very, very good man too. He treated me very nicely. Sure. Did you apprentice with anyone else at all? No. As a matter of fact, I never really apprenticed with the old man Blackstone because he did live in the United States and I was living in town at the time. But I did join the local magic club and many of you folks out there want to study magic. Want to get into the trade. You look up your magic club and there are magic clubs in every major city and even in many small towns all over the United States and through the world. But you look up the local Society of American Magicians or whatever society that is currently around and you join them and they're very nice folks. They take you under their wing and they teach you how to do these things. And that's what I did. And I came under the tutelage of a number of professionals who didn't formally tutor me, but they would give me guidance and whatnot and it was pretty well on my own from then on. Sure. Sort of today's crop of performers, who are some of your favorites or who do you think are some of the best? Well, Penn and Teller. Penn and Teller, I introduced Penn to Teller many years ago, so I'm totally responsible. I did that. I accept all the guilt for it. Yes, I introduced Penn to Teller in I think it was Philadelphia because they both came to see a talk of mine and they knew one another just briefly to say hello, but they were street performers and I said the two of them together, you look like the Laurel and Hardy or the Avon Castello of Magic and you should get together and that. Not a bad idea. Now we've got Penn and Teller, but Lance Burton is my, he's in Vegas and has his own theater and his own show there. He's a prince, a prince of a fellow, very, very good and nice person and exceedingly skilled. He does stuff which is that close to supernatural. Not quite supernatural, but that close. So how did you come to be billed as the amazing Randy? How did that come about? Oh, that came about very peculiar. I was working at a nightclub in Quebec City, Canada and I had said something about getting out of handcuffs. I was doing a standard magic act, but to somebody or other I said something about, oh, yeah, locks on handcuffs are very simple. A couple of policemen came to me and said, oh, you can get out of the handcuff, you want to show me? And so at the end of that show they clapped me in handcuffs and I got in one side of the squad car and out the other side with the handcuffs off. Oh, shackley blue. You know, all the things the French do when they get excited. And so they drove me down to the local police station and they locked me in a cell and it was a very simple thing. It had a simple padlock on the door. It wasn't one of these big professional things which might have given me a lot more trouble. And I walked out of that and the next day in the newspaper the Quebec soleil, the soleil, pardon me, the sun, said Laetan-en-Randy savant de la prison de Québec. The astonishing Randy or the amazing Randy. I didn't have a title up until then. I was the great Randall I think or something like that. But they called me Randy and it had Laetan-en-Randy, the amazing Randy. I used it from then on. It was the only newspaper clipping I ever had. So I bought a lot of copies of that paper, I can assure you. I filled them off all over the place and I became the amazing Randy. That's a neat story. Now, I first saw sort of a death-defying feat that you did on television a few years ago and it has stuck with me all of this time. That's a bad dream, right? Well, actually sort of as an amazing feat. Oh, there you go. That's much better. And it was, of course, the famous, I think it was a recreation of Houdini's famous milk can escape. Oh, yes. And I just wanted to ask you a little bit about that and how it feels as a performer to be going in such a small space underwater locked in, I can't imagine. Well, I don't have much fear of claustrophobia that doesn't affect me at all. And fear of heights and that sort of thing has just never bothered me. I've been in some pretty high spots like hanging over Niagara Falls, for example, in a straight jacket and such. But it doesn't worry me at all. All I'm worried is, what are the camera angles? Where are the cameras? Yeah, look good, look good. Sweat a lot, you know? So I can put all of that into the performance and not worry about whether I'm going to fall into the falls. But the milk can thing was it was like a big milk churn, as I used to call them, a thing about so big like that, filled with water with a lid that went on, had hasks coming down the side that locked on with padlocks. Right. And this was an absolute duplicate, a replica of one of the famous Houdini milk cans that was in the Houdini Museum in Niagara Falls, Canada many years ago. And I built this exactly to the plan of it. And it's terrifying. That really is, because you double over in the can, you put your head underneath the water, and as you do, some of the water flows over because you've displaced the water, and then they slam this can. That's nice. When they slam that can on you, you're getting really good transmission of sound to your ears. I'll tell you, you hear this bam, clang, click, clunk, and you think to yourself, as you're double over, and then you say, self, what are you doing? Sealed in a can full of water, just so people out there can be amused. And then you think of the fee, and you say, it's worth it, okay. And then you drink up all the water, and you can come. No, I didn't want to give away the secret, but there you go. Well, it's absolutely terrifying to the audience too, I think, in some respects. And I'm glad to hear that. But it does produce a certain amount of empathy, I think, and they, of course, I will tell you the secret. When you pull the curtain around, the thing of this, they put the cylinder curtain over you. You're out of the thing next to no time, but you sit on top of the can, building up the suspense. I used to keep them, I must tell you that. David Copperfield, in one of his very first television shows, in a theater outside Pittsburgh, I got him on the show that I was on, and he was. He was.