08/09/2026
The Best Mentor I Never Had
The way I first heard of Eugene Burger was a complete fluke. I had moved to Eugene, Oregon, and like any magician moving to a new city, I wanted to find the local magic club. So I did the obvious thing. I Googled “Eugene magic club.”
And up popped an article about this wizardly-looking Chicago magician who had apparently died. Oh well. I kept pushing forward, trying to find the Eugene, Oregon magic club. Eventually, I discovered it was much easier to search for the Mysticians, and easier still to just get on their email list.
But before figuring that out, I repeated the same stupid Google search several times. “Eugene magic club.” Eugene Burger. “Eugene Oregon magic club.” Eugene Burger. Finally, I remember thinking, who the hell is Eugene Burger?
Well, eventually I found out, and somehow this dead magician I had never met became one of the most important mentors I ever had.
There was something immediately different about Eugene. Here was a magician who could talk about theology, mythology, philosophy, and magic without making any of those subjects feel like they had been stapled awkwardly onto a card trick. Look no further than his Gypsy Thread routine! He was an intellectual, but not in the sense of someone trying desperately to make sure you knew he was an intellectual. His ideas were there in the magic.
That mattered to me. I have dyslexia. My relationship with reading and formal education has always been complicated, but I have always loved ideas. Theology, history, myth, philosophy, and science. Those things fascinate me. Eugene showed me that magic could be a place for those ideas too.
More importantly, he showed me that originality in magic didn’t necessarily have to mean inventing a new move. You could innovate in the script. You could find a way to add meaning to a piece of magic and transform it from a child’s parlor trick into something so beautiful it could move you to tears. You could take something that had existed for decades and ask a different question about it. Why am I doing this? What does this image mean? What story could this tell? That changed the way I thought about magic.
It also eventually led me to Jeff McBride and the Mystery School tradition that Eugene helped Jeff build. And in a strange way, Eugene led me to Jeff, and Jeff led me back to Eugene.
Through Jeff, I got access to some of Eugene’s earlier work, and that became one of the most important lessons of all, because some of it wasn’t very good. I don’t mean that disrespectfully. Even Eugene at his worst is better than me at my best. In fact, I mean almost exactly the opposite. I had already seen what some of those ideas would eventually become in Eugene’s hands. I knew the later scripts. I knew the confidence and rhythm. I knew the Eugene Burger who seemed to know exactly why every word was there. Then suddenly I was watching Eugene before all of that was finished.
It reminded me of a story Penn Jillette told on Penn’s Sunday School. Penn had gotten hold of bootleg recordings of the Beatles working on songs. Here was arguably the greatest band in history, except they weren’t being the Beatles we remember. They were working, trying things, asking ordinary questions, and figuring stuff out. That was a watershed moment for Penn because the magic disappeared. Not the art, but the mythology surrounding its creation. The Beatles hadn’t descended from Mount Olympus as demigods carrying finished songs. They worked them out.
Watching early Eugene did something similar for me. For the first time, I wasn’t just studying Eugene Burger’s magic. I was watching Eugene Burger become Eugene Burger. The finished Eugene was inspiring, but the unfinished Eugene was liberating. If Eugene Burger could have a version that wasn’t there yet, then maybe my version that isn’t there yet isn’t evidence that I can’t do this. Maybe it just isn’t there yet.
There was another side of Eugene that I discovered through Jeff that affected me even more deeply. During a conversation with Jeff McBride, we started talking about story and the idea of connecting our magic to stories from our own lives. That is complicated for me. My childhood isn’t exactly a bottomless well of charming anecdotes. There was abuse, abandonment, adoption, and a lot of things that don’t naturally transition into, “Anyway, pick a card.”
I remember talking to Jeff about that difficulty, and then he told me Eugene had been an orphan. That stopped me. By that point, Eugene was this larger-than-life character in my mind. The beard, the voice, the stories, the intelligence. This man who seemed to radiate wisdom and joy. And behind that was an orphan.
It made me understand something about storytelling that I don’t think I had been able to articulate before: authenticity doesn’t require autobiography. I don’t have to put every wound onstage to be honest. In fact, I often tell the history I wish I had rather than the history I actually lived.
I tell stories about old magicians, Houdini, traditions passed from one magician to another, myth, theology, death, restoration, and resurrection. Those aren’t literally the stories of my childhood, but they are mine. They tell you what I love. They tell you what I think matters. They tell you something about the world I wish I had inherited and, maybe, the world I am trying to create for myself.
And maybe that’s another thing Eugene taught me: not everything in magic has to exist simply to get us to the next surprise. Sometimes an old trick can carry an idea.
But Eugene also understood something extremely practical about being a working magician. Jeff routinely quotes Eugene as saying that there are “thinking audiences and drinking audiences.” I love that, because Eugene wasn’t saying every torn newspaper needed to become a meditation on mortality. Because of him, I frequently have two ways of approaching the same piece.
For one audience, I can tear a newspaper apart and talk about destruction, restoration, and resurrection. Something whole is destroyed in front of us and, impossibly, becomes whole again. For another audience? It’s a really good gag trick. Rip the damn newspaper up. Restore it. Get the laugh. Take the applause. Neither audience is wrong. Part of being a magician is understanding which room you’re standing in.
That lesson has probably affected my professional magic more than any individual sleight Eugene could have taught me. I never sat across from Eugene Burger. He never critiqued one of my scripts, watched me perform, or pulled me aside after a show and told me what I needed to fix. By the time I knew enough to understand who Eugene Burger was, he was already gone.
But he led me to Jeff, and Jeff led me deeper into Eugene. Eugene’s early work taught me that masters are made rather than born fully formed. His philosophy taught me that a script can be as much an act of creation as a sleight. His life taught me that darkness in your past doesn’t obligate you to make darkness your contribution to the world. And his magic taught me to tell stories. Sometimes they’re my stories. Sometimes they’re the stories I wish had been mine. But they’re honest.
Years ago, I sat at a computer trying to find a magic club in Eugene, Oregon, and Google kept insisting on giving me some dead magician from Chicago. Who the hell is Eugene Burger?
It turns out he was one of the best mentors I ever had. I just never got to meet him.
