Profiling a Magician

nMagician
By Jane Gerster
Due: Sep. 30, 2010

Rob Milne, 21, said he remembers his first magic gig vividly. “It was a little girl’s birthday, I remember all the kids there, they were watching me and I was sweating buckets, I was so nervous,” he said.
The long-time magician, based out of the Beaches neighbourhood in Toronto, Ont. Smiled and laughed, via Skype, as he recalled his early onstage blunders. “I remember the birthday girl saying, ‘when is it over?’” He said, raising his voice an octave to mimic a little girl.
As a kid, his stepfather used to bring home magic kits, Milne said. “He always performed them for me... then he gave them to me and I figured out how the trick works.”
Milne said his favourite genre of magic has always been cards. “I find a lot of magicians, when they do card tricks, there’s a lot of gimmicks involved... what I do has nothing to do with gimmicks.”
Milne said he always uses a regular card deck and let’s people look over it before and after to ensure it’s not rigged. “It builds the trick more than if you’re trying to hide a gimmick,” he said.
When he hit grade seven, his mother suggested he make money off his love for magic by doing shows, he said, adding that he didn’t really get a choice in choosing his stage name. “One day she got business cards made for me... it said ‘Robert the Magnificent’, so I didn’t really have a choice.”
Milne, who graduated in the spring from George Brown College with an Advanced Diploma in Graphic Design and currently works as a freelance graphic designer, said he used his early love for design to create a website and flyers to get him started.
The business picked up straight away. He said he attributes that partly to his low cost, saying he charges between 30 and 75 dollars per show. “I try and keep it cheap because a lot of magicians out there are charging like 500 dollars, especially in the Beaches.”
He would mostly perform at parties, for parents with kids, Milne said. Often he would do several shows in a row and then go awhile without performing. “Sometimes I didn’t even do a show at all, five in one week, and then a break.”
At home, Milne said his family remained supportive, but eventually got tired of his tricks. “I practiced whole shows in front of them and they helped me... but then everyone got sick of me saying, ‘pick a card, pick a card’... and they starting knocking the cards out of my hand.”
In high school, Milne said he still got a lot of attention for showing his tricks to friends. “It was all about Rob and his magic, I was the David Blaine of the school.”
He said he’s entirely self-taught. “DVDs and books taught me,” he joked. When he was younger he would take the smaller, individual tricks in the book and combine them into new tricks, he said.
Still, Milne said he isn’t so sure he likes the increasingly widespread distribution of instructional videos and DVDs. “It’s made it so many people can now get access to how the trick is done and it hurts the quality of it.”
He pointed to television magician Criss Angel’s levitation trick as an example. “All of a sudden it was posted on YouTube and everyone was figuring out how it was done,” he said.
Milne said he isn’t sure where magic is heading in the near future. “It’s not like its typical magic anymore where it’s Houdini and everyone goes to a show and enjoys real magic.”
Criss Angel would be his favourite magician, he said, if he performed live. “You can’t really judge his magic when you’re watching it through TV.”
This October, Milne will have come full circle. On Oct. 8, he will perform his first show in nearly a year, (after a hiatus to focus on graphic design) for the eighth birthday of a little girl who he also performed for when she was just eight months old.

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