

"Three of clubs," Nogulich said, and he was then instructed to turn over the top card. Jay then assembled the deck face down, shuffled, cut it into two piles, and asked Nogulich to point to one of the piles and name his card. After twenty minutes of disbelief-suspending manipulations, Jay spread the deck face up on the bar counter and asked Nogulich to concentrate on a specific card but not to reveal it. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher's named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the hotel.

Some years ago, late one night in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, was performing magic with a deck of cards. In his 1993 New Yorker profile of Jay, Mark Singer related the following story from playwright David Mamet and theater director Gregory Mosher: He quickly developed a following among magic aficionados, and a reputation for sleight-of-hand feats that baffled even his colleagues. ĭuring the 1960s and 70s, Jay lived in Ithaca, New York, performing while also intermittently attending the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, but later moved to the Los Angeles area. At New York's Electric Circus in the 1960s, he performed on a bill between Ike and Tina Turner and Timothy Leary, who lectured about LSD.
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He is most likely the youngest magician to perform a full magic act on TV, the first magician to ever play comedy clubs, and probably the first magician to open for a rock and roll band. Jay first performed in public at the age of seven, in 1953, when he appeared on the television program Time For Pets. Jay's grandfather, Max Katz, was a certified public accountant and amateur magician who introduced Jay to magic. All you need to know about my father is that after he brushed his teeth with Brylcreem he put the toothpaste in his hair." ĭuring an interview on the National Public Radio program Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Jay said that possibly "the only kind memory I ever had of my parents" was when they secretly hired one of his idols, magician Al Flosso, to perform at his bar mitzvah. Once, when I was ten, I switched the tubes. "He kept his toothpaste in the medicine cabinet and the Brylcreem in a closet about a foot away. He rarely spoke publicly about his parents, but did share an anecdote: "My father oiled his hair with Brylcreem and brushed his teeth with Colgate," Jay recalled. A member of a middle-class Jewish family, he grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Jay was born in the New York City borough of Brooklyn to Shirley (Katz) and Samuel Potash. In 2015 he was the subject of an episode of PBS's American Masters, the only magician ever profiled in the series.
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His acting credits included the films The Prestige, The Spanish Prisoner, The Ranger, the Cook and a Hole in the Sky, Mystery Men, Heist, Boogie Nights, Tomorrow Never Dies, State and Main, House of Games and Magnolia, and the HBO series Deadwood. He also wrote extensively on magic and its history. In addition to sleight of hand, he was known for his card tricks, card throwing, memory feats, and stage patter. In a profile for The New Yorker, Mark Singer called Jay "perhaps the most gifted sleight of hand artist alive". Richard Jay Potash (J– November 24, 2018), known professionally as Ricky Jay, was an American stage magician, actor and writer.
