Ivan Amodei Information

The illusionist and onetime marketing major has embarked on a nationwide tour, the most ambitious phase of his career in confounding the senses and transforming the world for audiences. While in college, Ivan Amodei had a job waiting tables in Thousand Oaks at the Velvet Turtle, a nowdefunct fine dining chain. Amodei and his fellow student waiters made a pact: We all decided when we graduated college we were going to quit, he said. I thought it would be too easy to stay. A lot of people with degrees did stay and wait tables. The marketing major left the restaurant as promised and went looking for work, until it dawned on him that none of the jobs on offer were better than the one he still had: magic. Amodei started practicing card tricks and other illusions when he was around 5 years old, and by the time he finished college he was performing at the Magic Castle in Hollywood and working parties. Just fooling around with my magic, doing corporate events, I was making more money than some of these corporate jobs I was interviewing for, Amodei said. I thought, I dont have a family, I dont have kids. Nobodys going to starve except me if I fail, so I might as well give this a whirl. Twenty-seven years later, Amodei is in a small class of entertainers: a professional stage magician who tours the country playing before crowds of hundreds or even thousands. In 2016, he appeared on Penn & Teller: Fool Us and fooled the famous hosts, with a trick that is still a part of his act. Amodei debuted his new show, Secrets & Illusions, in the summer of 2019 and started a nationwide tour in September that will last into 2020. There is a large worldwide community of magicians, but most are hobbyists or part-timers, said Michael Gerson, an associate professor of graduate psychology at Cal Lutheran and an amateur magician himself, though hes never met Amodei or seen him perform. Gerson studies the use of magic in therapy, and has a paper under review at a psychology journal on magics potential as an intervention tactic for children ...