Robert Gallup

Don?t ask how I get stories from the Shanghai Daily News. It was a strange moment of weakness when I was confronted by an alleged college student looking to sell subscriptions to pay her way through school. I don?t know how many subscriptions I bought but I figured based on me alone, she?ll get her doctorate ? probably in the psychology of Suckers.

Anyway, the Shanghai Daily News is reporting that Master Illusionist Robert Gallup is getting ready for an attempt to duplicate some Houdini?s most famous escapes. Says Mr. Gallup, ?It’s just not fun if the consequence of error isn’t death.”

That?s my motto too; but I apply it to shaving and flossing.

Mr. Gallup has an amazing presence and an incredible talent. It’s nice to see the good guys getting the props they deserve.

Mr. Gallup?s show is called, ?Extreme Magic, Deadly Escapes.” He?ll do his now famous, ?Challenge of the Death Dive.?

What?s the challenge and what?s the death dive? He gets good and shackled, locked in a mailbag, put into a six foot cell and dropped from a plane about a three miles over the Mojave Desert in California. He had about one minute to escape and open his parachute.

In August 2002, Gallup impressed a Beijing audience with a public charity show. He was shackled and suspended upside down more than 150 feet high above the Great Wall. Big deal, you say, anyone can be shackled and hanging over the…
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Around this time of year, we?re supposed to do two things: look back on the year that was and make resolutions for the year that will be. The look back is kind of trite and the resolutions for the New Year are usually broken almost immediately.

Maybe we should think about the way things have been and what we have learned to help us in the coming year.

There?s no sense chronicling the things that happened. Some of them are so sad that there is nothing pithy or profound to be offered.

There is no humor or lesson to be learned in the tiger attack that robbed Siegfried and Roy of a final show on their own terms. Would the lesson be that Roy shouldn?t have worked with tigers and lions? PETA thought so but that is to be expected.

What was not expected, however, was that some magicians took the same position and voiced their condemning observation of hindsight at the same moment Roy was fighting for his life. These are brothers in Magic (I used the term ?brother? generically). The brethren made these statements about Roy after the tragic accident but are not on record anywhere before October 3,…
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