At a magic show with his godmother, an entranced four-year-old David Minkin watched The Metamorphosis, made famous by Houdini in his heyday. An empty trunk was locked and sealed. When opened seconds later, a magician’s assistant popped out with a flourish and a smile.

“I knew immediately how it was done,” the Cal State Northridge alumnus recalls. He loved it anyway. Why? Because, believes Minkin, it is not the “how” but the “wow” that allows magic to thrive in an age of skeptics and seen-it-alls.

“Ultimately, my goal is to take an audience and give it a range of colors of magic, different emotions,” said Minkin, International Brotherhood of Magicians Gold Cups Competition winner who astonishes audiences by producing rain on command. “I gain rapport with them and take them somewhere they didn’t expect to go.”

The practice of magic is not where Minkin had expected to go. After a collision with a truck sent him into physical therapy, he enrolled in Cal State Northridge’s renowned physical therapy program and immersed himself in his studies.

But magic re-surfaced in the form of the close-up Chop Cup routine. Classmate Ronald Bell ’98 (Physical Therapy) showed Minkin that feat, involving a cup, a ball, a lemon coming out of the cup and… easier to watch than to explain.

“It upset my sense of reality,” said Minkin. Close-up magic, performed for up to 50 people in an intimate setting, had him hooked.

What he did next is at the heart of the message he brings to students pursuing their own dreams. “In my practical upbringing,” said the Northridge resident, “you were to find a good job and, if necessary, do what you love on the side.

“The opposite is what I’ve learned in life. Find what you’re passionate about and find a way to make it pay your bills. Make it your priority.”

Starting out, the untried young magician was told he could not earn a living as a close-up magician; that was for big stage illusionists. “I just refused to accept that,” he said.

He sat down, visualized his future, wrote down his goals and did some figuring: the way to support himself in the close-up arena was to perform for audiences who could afford to pay a bit more. He made a plan. He began to network.

Today, the former star of television’s “Room 401” numbers actor Johnny Depp, director Rob Reiner and rockers Guns ‘N Roses among his fans. His “Evening of Enchantment” show at the Beau Rivage in Malibu has run for two straight years.

“Create your vision from your passion,” he urges students. “Make it as specific as possible. Write it down as an act of intention.” The magic will follow.

— Joseph O'Connor

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