“Want to see a free mind-reading trick?” magician Hayden Childress asks on his website. “Whatever you do, DON’T read this sentence. Amazing isn’t it? You couldn’t help read but the sentence! Also, you probably didn’t notice ‘but’ and ‘read’ were switched in the sentence above, did you? Magic!”
“Is this some kind of mind game?” you might ask. “Surely, this isn’t ‘magical.’” Well, according to Childress, “Magic is just inherently tricks on your mind, something that’s messing with your perception of the world.”
But Childress’ on-stage tricks go beyond switching words around in a sentence. He prefers to use everyday, practical props. “Like, I might borrow a phone from the crowd,” he says. “Everything I do is very interactive. A lot of it involves me bringing a person up. It’s sleight of hand, comedy, and psychology with a lot of these tricks — messing with how people think or the decisions they’re going to make.”
And if you think that there’s no way someone can trick such a smarty as yourself, think again because Childress has been practicing his sleight of hand since he was 10. “I got into [magic] the same way most people got into it,” he says. “I saw some magic on television. Right away I went to the public library and picked up a bunch of books on magic and studied them front to back. And when I was about 11, there was a magic shop at a shopping mall about an hour from where I lived. I used to go there, and the magic shop owner saw that I was really into it and just let me work for tips doing tricks outside the shop. I would walk up to people at a table in the food court and say, ‘Hi, can I show you a magic trick?’ I did that pretty much every weekend.”
Childress also picked up gigs in high school, working parties. “I knew I could make some money doing it,” he says. “I wasn’t sure how doable it was to do it full-time because I didn’t know many people who did it at the time.” So, by his late teens, he was stuck between choosing college or pursuing magic, but as fate would have it , two established and successful full-time magicians (one of whom was David Copperfield), upon meeting him, advised him to do both. “Because if you fail with the magic, you have a fallback of a normal career so that way you can take more risks.”
So, instead of going to college parties, Childress took any gig that he could while pursuing his degree in business. Oddly enough, some of his business lessons have applied well to his magic — particularly in learning about consumer behavior, he says. “So like how does Amazon make you buy this brand of pen? A lot of it is the same psychology. Like how did Hayden make me think of ace of hearts? It’s kind of like using those same techniques in the show, but I use them for magic. It’s less marketable but it’s more fun.”
Now a full-time magician, Childress says of his work, “I hope that after someone sees it that it might make them think of the world differently. But if they don’t, they can just enjoy any magic trick.”
Hayden Childress, Halloran Centre, Friday, May 20th, 8 p.m., $28-$35.
