Magician Performs Crossword Magic Trick

Growing up I was your average homeschooled kid. I'd spend my evenings drinking Earl Grey tea and solving crossword puzzles with my stuffed panda. You may wonder how I fit this into my thriving social schedule. Somehow I found the time. Shockingly not much has changed in the last 15 years, but I did find a way to take my quirky eccentricities, kinks, and thousands of hours worth of free time, aka the things that used to get my ass kicked, and put them into an act that got me on this stage tonight. So take that you ass kickers! I'm now a magician and my panda is now my DJ. Just go with it. And along with our lovely assistant Brooke, we've developed a magical crossword puzzle for you. Now unlike other illusionists, I'm going to tell you exactly how this trick works. And you still won't believe me. It's a pretty tight fit. You comfortable Brooke? Great. Some say that words can't hurt you, but this now grown-up homeschooled reject begs to differ. So tonight, every time Penn and Teller solve a crossword clue, I'm going to push one of these wooden word blocks into our puzzle. So Penn, what's a six-letter word for annoyed to the point of distraction? Teller. Teller? Exactly. Great job. And Teller, I'm looking for a four-letter word for verbose. Penn! Precisely. And finally, both Penn and Teller, a five-letter word for your favorite place on Earth. Vegas. Beautiful. Right again. Incredible. Now at this point, you're probably all wondering just how Brooke has managed to contort her body to avoid so many deadly words. But I promised you that I would divulge our secret. You see, while you were distracted by all these obscure words, Brooke actually snuck out the back of the box. She's hiding behind it right now. Take a look. Psych! And I mean... Psych. A five-letter word for whatever our speaker just said was done purely to mess with our listeners' minds. And indeed, I am messing with your mind. Brooke never left the puzzle. You would have noticed that. The answer lies in a four-letter word, meaning present and at hand. Here. She's here. To be more specific, she's actually right here. You see, Brooke has trained her body to fit within this tiny center post. And now you don't believe me. Show them, Brooke. As Sherlock Holmes once said, whenever you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. So the next time that you're feeling rejected, just remember that it's not always about fitting in. Sometimes it's just about being here. A four-letter word meaning present and in the moment. Right, Brooke? Thank you so much. Hi. So the story of the trick is actually a true story? It is a true story. I was homeschooled. Both of my parents are here tonight. My parents actually drove the prop here. My dad built the illusion. That's beautiful. So this is a one-of-a-kind trick. This is a one-of-a-kind illusion. No one else has built or performed this before. And we built it specifically for Penn & Teller this stage tonight. So what inspired this trick? I like to tell my story through magic. And so we selected this to share a little bit about my insecurities as well as getting over those insecurities and hopefully to inspire people to realize that it's okay to feel different. It's okay to feel like you may not fit in because those are the things that make you who you are. So cool. Well, let's see if Penn & Teller have puzzled out your trick. Penn, tell her. Oh, Josh, you know, you have a certain kind of ethereal confidence. That's very, very nice. I love the pacing the most of this whole thing. It's just gentle and kind and honest. And speaking of honest, you really were telling the truth. No one else believed you. We did. Wonderful to see this blade box type setup, but not using, you know, the stuff they stick through blades or swords, whatever they do in that kind of stuff is never really dangerous. You just have to pretend it's dangerous. So using the words and using the crossword image for looking inside there is really wonderful. Also, people at home might think that any sort of trick like this is done with mirrors. It's not. If it was done with mirrors with some sort of turn, there'd be some sort of glitchy reflections, which you didn't have there. You solved that really nicely. And being homeschooled, I know that a lot of people I know who are homeschooled, which I'm all in favor of, by the way, have a real love of literature. I don't know if you ever read Ibsen's The Dollhouse, but you probably read a lot of stuff like that. A lot of stuff like The Dollhouse and other classics like that. We've loved every bit of the routine, loved your innovations, and do not think that you fooled us. What do you think, Josh? So no, you did not fool me. You're wonderful. Thank you so much. This is a dream come true. I think you said that backwards, but you didn't fool us is what you meant. That is correct. What's different about my magic is that it's storytelling. For example, I always grew up with stuffed pandas. I brought my stuffed panda into the act because I needed something to share with my audience that shows my innocence the way that I used to be. I was bullied a lot in high school. And the red one is the bully, so we really don't much care what his name is. There were two to three years where I truly felt completely and entirely alone. So my magic shows the brokenness that I've gone through to encourage people to get over their own brokenness. I wanted a genuine connection with real people. Now, if you like my magic, you like me.