“I’m going to run this sharp sword straight through your neck. “You feel this?” she asked, as she slid the sword through the wooden collar, poking my neck with a cool metal point. “You see this,” she said, as she sliced the newspaper with a sword. I clamped the square collar around my neck as Dietrich held up a piece of newspaper. “Great, put this around your neck.” The audience howled, and I looked at the brothers sitting in front of me: a prepubescent boy wearing a T-shirt with the faces of Donald Trump and Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood’s symbol of Nixonian vigilante law and order and the boy’s slightly older, rail-thin brother, sporting a red trucker hat with the message: “Trump. On stage, Dietrich asked me, “Are you afraid of swords or being confined?” Normally, it would depend on the situation, I thought, but I said no, and she picked up a thick square collar of wood, with a rounded-out center and a hinge on one side. (In a video on YouTube, Dietrich stands behind a plate of glass as a man fires a bolt-action rifle aimed at her face.) In 1988, Dietrich, who co-owns and operates the museum with her partner, fellow magician Dick Brookz, famously became the first woman to successfully perform the bullet-catching trick, which has killed, purportedly, a dozen magicians. I was at the Houdini Museum in downtown Scranton, Pa.
She held her gaze for a moment toward the back of the crowd and straightened her finger, “You there, sir,” summoning me to the stage. She scanned the cross-legged children seated before her and the crowd of teenagers, parents and other adults behind them. She raised a flat hand to her eyebrows, almost in mock salute, looking for a volunteer.
(Jim Graham)ĭorothy Dietrich, the First Lady of Magic, stood alone on a compact stage, her blond hair stark against the backdrop of heavy red curtains. Dorothy Dietrich with her partner, fellow magician Johnny Bravo, at their Houdini Museum in Scranton, Pa.
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