The Legend Begins!

1994: For Christmas my Grandmother, who was quite adept at finding the diamonds in the rough of any and all of her local garage sales, yard sales, and flea markets, came across a book titled “The Klutz Book of Magic”. A highly instructional book that said yes to being silly and broke down magic routines to their core. The aim of the book wasn’t to recreate an army of copy cats but rather to teach the fundamentals of magic in simple terms so that one could build upon the concepts and create their own routines. 8 Year old Nate LeGros received this book one cold, Christmas afternoon in Toledo Ohio. A Star was born....

The Legend Grows

2 years later I asked my 4th grade teacher Mrs. Blackburn if I should enter the talent competition my elementary school was holding. I wanted to do magic. She looked at me and said, “Nate if you are half as good as what you’ve been getting away with in this class for the last 6 months you’ll have nothing to worry about.”

High School and College

Wasn’t very good at either. To keep from falling asleep in class (and suffer the wrath of over zealous T.A.s) I would bring with me a red rubber ball to practice my sleight of hand and dexterity. A practice I still continue to this day.

Magic Career

‘Magic Nate’ started when I worked as a floor supervisor for a call center. The trainer did not know my name but did know that I would do magic tricks to pass the ample amounts of down time. Due to my sever case of getting bored fast and easily I developed a habit of learning a new trick every week. After 2 years of working in that petri dish for cold and flu season I had amassed a large collection of tricks, props, and routines. It was time to unleash this skill on people other than friends and co-workers.

A Personal Style

Around the time that I was 23 I had a small but presentable magic show. The jokes were stale and my technique was a little sloppy but I would never walk away with a poor performance. What I didn’t have was a identifiable style to call my own. One day to settle a debt of $25 I owed to my sister I performed at one of her ‘Silent Picnics’ that was put on for the deaf community. Her students were given a chance to interact with the deaf culture in a fun and educational environment. The one rule was that nobody was aloud to talk. Up until this time I had performed a talking show and so had to change how I performed my tricks so that people could still follow what was going on for the performance. I could not simply say that I had an ordinary deck of cards in my hand. I had to show that I had an ordinary deck of cards in my hand. During the show I was performing my now famous ‘Arm Chopper’ routine. This routine had always given me issues because the comedy wasn’t timed right and the actual ‘Tada!’ moment would happen too quickly for people to really understand what happened. During the performance I went to grab a volunteer and realized that I hadn’t actually brought out the Arm Chopper prop yet. So the volunteer had no idea what trick she was ‘volunteering’ for. So I decided to play with that. I handed her the carrots and then faced her away from where the prop would be set up. Now the audience would see this contraption with a large blade sticking out but the volunteer couldn’t. In a moment of pure inspirational luck she very nervously began to look over her shoulder to see what had just been brought out and I quickly placed my hand on the top of her head and turned it to face away and received a very noticeably amused response from the audience. In another coincidence that I’m almost certain was fate I happen to have a pair of eye goggles in my kit bag left over from a project I had been working on earlier that day. So I decided to put them on. Which lead to another great response from the audience. I finished the routine, the blade successfully passed through the volunteer’s wrist without harm but still managing to slice the carrots. I knew the show went well, but I didn’t realize how well until after the picnic when a number of people in the audience came up afterwards to chat and ask for my contact information. I knew that I had something with what I did with the Arm Chopper routine but I couldn’t see a way to add funny lines to the routine without sacrificing the humor that arose naturally by doing it silent. So I decided not to fight it and committed to doing the routine silent. In the beginning it felt a little out of place with the rest of the show in which I still talked. But the solution was simple. Don’t talk for any of it.