Holy Toledo!

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Happy Valentine’s Day! We will catch up with Brian and Ofelia this evening and celebrate with dinner at Basílico. Early this afternoon we have a date with Pepe and Woody Aragón to help with the taping of Woody’s course for Magic Agora. We will be part of the taping of the effects, but not the explanations. This will be a first for both of us and it should be fun.

Before lunch yesterday we visited the Nespresso store to stock up on coffee and when we got back home we decided that we were really in the mood for a light lunch so we took advantage of the moment to dine on all the leftovers in the fridge. By the time we had finished lunch it was time for me to catch up with Melissa at Las Torres for our conversation lesson. She wanted to go over rooms and items found in a house and I had found a good graphic on the Internet and I brought that along.

Our vocabulary lesson lasted almost and hour and a half and when I returned home I found an e-mail from Pepe telling me that he and Woody were working on the script for today’s taping, but they would be at the CIVAC for dinner. I got there a little after 8:30 and both Pepe and Woody had arrived earlier and Woody was deeply engaged in conversation with several of the members. Some fifteen minutes later I had the chance to chat with him. We discovered that we had an event in common in our past even though neither of us was aware of it until that moment.

Woody is from Toledo and the first Spanish National Magic Convention that I attended was in Toledo in June of 1990. It was there that I had the opportunity to see some of the true stars of Spanish and European magic. I got to see Paul Daniels, Barnard Bilis, Tommy Wonder, Bob Read, Camilo, Pepe Carroll, Juan Tamariz and Arturo de Ascanio perform on the same bill. It turns out that there lived in Toledo a 14-year-old boy who was interested in magic, but had never seen it performed in his Toledo because he knew of no magicians in his town and there most certainly was no magic store there. On his way home from school he sees a gathering of magicians on the steps of the theater in his home town and when he draws closer he sees a poster listing the events for the convention and he notices that there is a close-up gala later that day. Knowing nothing about conventions and ID badges and the like, he walks into the theater, takes a seat and is absolutely amazed at all that he sees. That is when the magic bug took a firm foothold in the body, mind and soul of Woody Aragón and to this day it has not let hold of its grip.

In the course of our conversation, which started out in Spanish and continued in English, Woody allowed that the only problem with having seen that first show in Toledo was that he thought that all magicians performed at that level of expertise. He soon found out the truth. Magic has allowed Woody to travel and he has spent a goodly amount of time in the US. He has traveled frequently to Miami where he has appeared with Don Francisco on his Saturday night show that is broadcast on Univision in the States. He has also appeared at Monday Night Magic in New York and has competed in Dallas and Las Vegas. He has also been to Pittsburgh where he competed in the last SAM Convention. Woody has yet to make it to California, but hopefully he will make it there soon. His most recent travel took him to London where he competed in the International Magic Convention and won First Prize for close-up magic.

A little after 9:30 we sat down with our sandwiches that had been prepared for all of us by Paquito and our conversations continued. A little after 10:30 I was beginning to run low on energy and so I said my goodbyes and walked back home. Juan Manuel Marcos who lives close by accompanied me on the way. When I walked in the house Susan was watching TV. We chatted for a while and then I headed for bed to rest up for my TV debut today.