Getting my ears pierced

Natasha is owner and lead assistant of "The Wonder Show" and I caught up with her during a break in rehearsals before a 16 day run at the prestigious Hong Kong Magic Theatre. This is a transcript of the interview I got.

Me: Thank you, Natasha, for granting me an interview after what seemed, to me, to be a stressful rehearsal session.

Natasha: You're most welcome. It'll probably do me good to think about something other than the show for a while.

Me: So how is the show coming together?

Natasha (looking at me as if I had not got the point of her previous comment): The show is coming along great. We'll get it perfect by opening night, 'cause there's nothing major adrift, just a few people who haven't worked out where they need to be, in what costume, and doing which bit of choreography. The most stressful thing is doing the promotion; all those talk shows and my Chinese isn't all that good.

Me: So on to question number one for every interviewer asks anyone involved in the magical arts; how did you get into magic and illusion?

Natasha: Truthfully, I was never really into magic as a kid. If your dad is an amateur magician, like mine was, you don't really take much interest. Sure, I was involved in many of his magic shows when I was in school, but that was mostly sitting in cramped spaces waiting for my cue to appear and look daughter cute. There was one time, one summer, when I failed to appear, because after a generous lunch and with the warm weather I fell asleep. So, you see, magic was more a chore than a wonder, because I knew how the tricks worked; it didn't excite me then.

Me: That's not the answer I was expecting. I was more expecting the 'I got a magic set at the age of seven and the rest is history' answer.

Natasha: Well I did get a magic set, actually for my seventh birthday (are you psychic?), but I couldn't impress my parents because they knew so much, so it didn't seem worth it at that tender age. I did learn all the tricks eventually, but that started out like this.

Natasha: My school friends knew I had got a magic kit for my birthday and wanted me to do a trick, so I learnt a trick and, wanting to impress my friends, I learnt it well; my parents saw me practicing and made performance suggestions, which being a relatively dutiful child I followed. The trick went down a storm; so, of course, they wanted me to do another one. I had made a rod for my own back. Throughout my education I was learning about a trick a month to keep my friends happy; it almost became more of a chore than appearing in Dad's show. The only thing that helped was that they, my parents, would pass my household chores to my brother, who had even less interest in magic than me, when I was practicing.

Me: I didn't know you had a brother.

Natasha: He stays out of the limelight. He still lives near where we grew up with his girlfriend that he met at college. They run an accountancy and law firm. My brother is the lawyer I wanted to be when I was growing up and his wife does the accountancy and they have given me two lovely nephews to fuss over when I am home. [She stared into the air wistfully for a moment as if she missed home and/or family life sometimes]

Me: So, how did you get turned on to magic? Because you sound like magic didn't do anything for you, except take up your time. But now you are evangelistic for the magical and allied arts; you seem to eat, drink and dream magic.

Natasha: That was the result of me wanting to get my ears pierced. I knew mum would be dead against it; she was dead against anything that might be termed 'body modification', because she lost a close friend to septicaemia after she had visited a tattoo parlour for a belly piercing. So I approached dad. He wasn't exactly enthusiastic, but he didn't dismiss the possibility out of hand; he said to come back to him in a month's time, if I was determined to be pierced.

Natasha: Naturally, being the determined kind of person I am, a month later I asked again. He said he would organise having my ears pierced with some conditions. The first and most obvious, given my mother's objection to piercings, was that I would get them done in a place of his choosing, somewhere with a good clean reputation. The second was that I provided him with a list of parts I might want piercing in the future. This sounded weird to me, but he said that if I wanted any of the other piercings in the future he would arrange it. He gave the impression of wanting to find out the worst case of his daughter getting piercings. And the third condition was that I audition for a magician friend of his, whose wife was pregnant and his other assistant would be going to college shortly.

Me: I'm guessing that something happened at the audition, right?

Natasha: Yes, that was quite pivotal, but first let me tell you about the list of piercings I made. I turned out to be relevant. The only piercing I really wanted was my ears, but I decided, after a little research among my friends to add nose, eyebrow, lip, tongue and belly button and then for sheer devilry I added nipples and clit; that's teenage rebellion for you. [She paused as if trying to work out if I was still interested]

Me: Do go on!

Natasha: When Dad read the list he raise an eyebrow at the last two items. I told him I was keeping my options open and I wouldn't be troubling him for anything other than the ears any time soon. He seemed relieved. He kept the list and told me that he had arranged for my audition with his friend the following Saturday afternoon and that he would drop me off there, on his way to a party he was magicianing at.

Natasha: When I went with dad, mum seemed surprised, because I usually made myself scarce when magic was being threatened. Dad told mum he was giving me a lift to see a friend (carefully not specifying whose friend). We arrived at Dad's friend's place, it seemed huge, like a mansion, I, kind of, expected the door to be answered by a butler. As it happened it was answered by Bert. He invited us in, but dad declined, saying he had a party to entertain and he wished me luck and told me to do my best.

Me: Was that Bert Santico, the first magician for "The Wonder Show"?

Natasha: Yes, but that is another story. Besides he was going by the name Bert Bridgeworth at the time.

Me: What happened?

Natasha: Well, he took me through to his rehearsal studio, where he auditioned me. He got me to dance and pose, tell a joke and perform a few of the tricks I had learnt to please my school friends. He told me that my dancing was a bit 'girls in the bedroom', which I suppose was fair, although it didn't feel it at the time, but he said I had good rhythm. He said my posing was excellent, which is hardly surprising as I had been doing the magician's assistant poses for at least ten years. The joke he said had been weak, but well delivered; again no real surprise, as I had been using humour with my "Trick of the Month" so I was confident speaking to small crowds of willing onlookers. He seemed blown away by my tricks; it was like he hadn't a clue what to expect or how the trick was done, which I later discovered was exactly the case.

Me: I guess something else happened, because I wouldn't think just having a couple of tricks appreciated by a professional magician would have caused the turnaround in your attitude to magic, that you say this incident in your life caused.

Natasha: Yes, exactly. 'Attitude' was the very word he used. He asked why I was auditioning for him, because while I was better than OK, I had the potential to be terrific, and was just going through the motions. I admitted that I found magic a bore and I only learnt my tricks, because I felt obligated to keep my friends, erm, to keep them amused and entertained. He asked me why I was auditioning for a magic-based job, if I was not really interested. I told him about my deal with dad. He told me that if I became his assistant, I wouldn't be allowed to get any piercings, because of the risk of catching something on the equipment and ripping out a piercing, thus not only injuring myself, but damaging the equipment and, if it happened during a show, his reputation.

Natasha: That's when it happened. He said, "If you like I can give you the temporary experience of having piercings. You could try it; at least then you'd know if you'd want to do it permanently." I asked him how. He said, "Magic, of course," like magicians do.

Me: I assume that was when you experienced your first real magic.

Natasha: You could say that and a lot more besides. He said he had some magic that would allow me to experience being pierced in a non-permanent way. I thought I might as well humour him as he was a nice old man; he must have been in his mid-thirties, but what with me being just sixteen and him being a friend of dad's, he seemed ancient. Given that I had only mentioned the ear piercing dream, I imagined he'd be trotting out the old dagger head-box, but what he produced looked more like a headmover for someone standing up; basically a pair of uprights supporting an across-ways board with a gap for a neck in the base of a head-box. There were a couple of cross pieces at the back, which I assumed were there to add some strength to the thing. He put the thing facing his practice mirror and fetched a couple of extra pieces. The first thing was a 'U' shaped saddle on a bit of tubing; he mounted this in the centre of the base of the device and asked me to sit in the saddle and put my head in the box. I was going to ask for instructions, when I realised that no instructions were necessary, as I'd been the victim of the head-box so many times, before it occurred to me to wonder what the audience was seeing. The only instructions I'd ever had for this trick were a curt 'Sit still and keep quiet!' from my dad.

Natasha: Getting into the saddle was a bit tricky, but I managed with some grace. And my head was soon totally inside the box. He came and fitted a bit in the front of the neck slot and a board between the uprights, across my belly. "And now! Some piercings!" he said bringing out a stand with several swords in it, each was like a fencing epee (thin and about three foot long with a hand guard covering some of the handle). I thought that they were cooler than the wooden daggers my dad used, which I would often be given to repaint the blades with silver paint. He took one out and showed it to me. "This what I'll be piercing your ears with," he said. I took it that he was being a bit dramatic as he stood on a stool behind me and lined the sword up horizontal with its tip against the outside of the box containing my head. "Haven't you forgotten something?" I asked. He looked a bit puzzled, but he seemed to be double checking the alignment of the sword. "What about closing the front of the box?" Light dawned, "No, this box has no front. I piercing your ears not vanishing your head."

Natasha: He pushed the tip of the blade through the wall of the box and I felt it touch my earlobe. I started to try and remove the bit holding my neck in place, without much success as I hadn't seen how he locked it in place and I was working blind. He pulled the sword back and told me to hold still, because he didn't want to scratch me. This struck me at the time as absurd; he seemed perfectly happy to try and push a sword through my earlobe, but he didn't want to scratch me. I froze. He pushed the sword forward again and I felt it pierce my earlobe and I also felt it exit from the other side. I braced myself to feel it touch the top of my neck at the base of my skull, but all I felt was the pull as the blade continued to pass through my earlobe. My earlobe felt warm, with a pleasant tingle, definitely not what I had expected; I had expected pain and the warmth of fresh blood starting to trickle down my neck. The warm tingle I was feeling was quite nice. Then I felt the point of the sword touch and enter my other earlobe and as it exited I felt the same warm tingle in that earlobe. It was like the opposite of a headache. It was then I noticed the tip of the sword exit the other side of the box. I wondered how he had done it; the sword seemed too rigid to have taken a detour round my neck, besides I knew from experience that you don't feel the sword going through when it goes through.

Me: I guess you mean the standard sword through the neck trick.

Natasha: Yeah, I often got used as a victim for that in the early years, when dad couldn't get a willing volunteer.

Me: I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt your story.

Natasha: That's OK. Sometimes I forget I'm talking to someone with some knowledge of what I'm talking about. It does me good grounding-wise to be brought down a peg or two, or I might start to get smug or arrogant, neither which are good traits in the magical professions.

Natasha: So, back to the story. Bert moved the sword back and forth for a bit and the feeling of being tugged in different directions exactly matched the movement of the sword. I was beginning to suspect there was more to this magic than I knew about. "Did you want to get anything else pierced? I could let you experience that too. What about your nose?" he asked. "I was giving it some, not very serious, thought," I replied. He continued, "Were you thinking of a nose ring or a stud?" In truth, I had not considered it deeply enough to know there were different kinds of nose jewellery and I admitted as much.

Natasha: He went and fetched another sword and shifted the stool round to the front, then he stood on it and put the sword through the other side of the box. I tried to shake my head, but I couldn't move it much because of the sword through my earlobes. "I'm not sure I want to do this anymore." I said. "It doesn't hurt does it?" he asked as if the possibility had only just occurred to him. I assured him that I felt OK, just not sure what was happening. He assured me that I was bound to be a little disorientated having had a sword through the earlobes.

Natasha: He adjusted the sword until I felt it touched the underside of the outside of my nostril, then he lifted it with the side of the point and pushed it forward another half inch, then he lifted the outside of the other nostril before pushing the sword the rest of the way to and through to the opposite side of the box. "That's what a nose ring would feel like," Bert stated, although he admitted that a small nose ring would not put pressure on the rest of my nose. The feeling of having a sword through my septum seemed to be more warm tingling and I was beginning to relax, despite the strangeness of the situation.

Natasha: He went back to the sword stand and returned with another sword. "What's that for?" I asked. "You didn't seem to know if the wanted a ring or a stud in your nose, so I thought you'd like to try both." I assented and he inserted the sword through the top corner of the box and I saw the tip pass across the vision of the eye on that side, then I felt it pierce the wall of my flared nostril, before continuing out of my nose and out of the box somewhere just inside the bottom corner. There was more warm tingling and a kind of feeling of wellbeing that seemed to gently flow from the sites of my piercings.

Me: That would be the magiphoria; the excess of good feelings that magical victims feel to cancel out the bad feelings of the actual cause. Was this really your first time with real magic?

Natasha: I know what 'magiphoria' means and yes, it was my first time feeling real magic. I found out later that dad was, technically speak, a prestidigitator, using sleight of hand and devices to make it seem that magic is happening. Bert was the first magician I had ever met; what he was doing was absolutely real. I've also met a few illusionists, who use the power of their minds to make it appear that things are happening.

Me: The only true illusionist I ever met was making a living doing the Three Card Monte with three black kings and making which ever one of them suited him appear to be the red queen.

Natasha: Wow, now that is control. The ones I have met could only make the present seem absent or vice versa. I'd like to meet him.

Me: I'll give you a contact number, but you were telling me about your first experience of real magic; I'm sorry I interrupted.

Natasha: Yes, well. He got out a piece of paper from his pocket and consulted it. I instantly recognised it as the page I had written my list of potential piercings. "Where did you get that?" I asked. "Your dad gave it to me," he said. I had thought that this information was private between me and dad. "Why would he do that?" Strangely, I was more interested in my dad's motives than what Bert was planning to do with the information. He actually answered the question. "Your dad said that I should use your list of piercings as a premise to test if you'd make a real magician's assistant." Now I was confused. He added, "He seemed to think if you were a really a true magician's assistant, you'd give up the idea of getting piercings, even in your ears to follow your destiny as a magician's assistant and if you were just a mundane, the pain would put you off getting any piercings; for a prestidigitator he seems to have a Machiavellian take on the uses of magic."

Natasha: "Well," I asked, "Does that mean I'm a proper magician's assistant, because I'm not screaming in agony?" He nodded. "I don't think what I've felt so far, kind of nice though it is, would persuade me that magician's assistant is what I want to be." "That's because I have not finished," he replied. I reached up and fumbled for the sword that ran horizontally across the front of my face; the nose ring simulator. "I wouldn't do that if I were you." "Why not?" I asked, pausing in my gropings for the sword handle. "Do you know the consequences of taking that sword out will be?" Of course I didn't and, given the implied bad consequences, I was suddenly unwilling to find out. "So what are you planning to do to me?" "Now that I know you have the potential to be a real magician's assistant and you are already a highly skilled prestidigitator too, I plan to give you all the piercings on your list and then ask you if you want to become my assistant in 'The Wonder Show'." "And do I get any choice in this?" I asked. "No. Your dad said to keep right on to the end, unless you were screaming with pain." I considered this. "To the end of the list?" He nodded. What had I got myself into?

Natasha: The next sword was pushed through the top of the box and passed into my forehead just above my eyebrow on the opposite side to the one that went diagonally down through my nose. "I need you to close your eye," he said. "And if I don't?" "I'll have to wait until you blink, but that will be less comfortable for you," he stated. I closed my eye and felt the point exit my eyebrow ridge just above my closed eye and then I couldn't open it. What I was seeing with my other eye was the blade appeared the have pinned my eyelid to my cheek. I'm not entirely sure where the sword went from there but the movement of that shoulder seemed a bit restricted after that.

Natasha: After that he went round behind me with the next sword and I soon felt it passing through my lower lip and watched in combined horror and fascination as nearly two feet of steel protruded from my face. By now I was feeling as if not a lot mattered; the magiphoria was almost making me not care what was happening to me, although intellectual I knew I was experiencing some kind of magical rush of endorphins and my dad had conspired with this man to cause it. The following sword came in under my chin and exited out the top of the box, but I only felt it pass through my tongue. "Thith ith gointa 'ake it dih-hicult to thpeeak," I tried to say. He smiled at the truth of my statement. "Then don't talk and enjoy the sensations," he advised.

Natasha: I hardly noticed the next sword that passed through my belly button, because I was trying to examine my feelings and sensations. The physical sensations were simple enough: each piercing produced a pleasurable impression that was the opposite of the pain that you might expect, while not eliminating the knowledge that there should be pain there; setting up a tension about where the boundary between pain and pleasure should be and where it had been move to. During this introspection, I also discovered that where the swords passed through parts without the piercing feeling of warm tingling, they were also generating faint but noticeable pleasure sensations too.

Natasha: Of course, my emotions were a mess. Trying to straighten out your feelings under the powerful influence of magiphoria is just impossible. So my mind was a warm fuzzy battlefield where the feeling of betrayal, from dad arranging for me to be stabbed by multiple swords to what end I couldn't fathom, and the terror of the whole procedure fought against the feeling of the anti-headache and some curiosity about what other real magic might feel like.

Natasha: I resurfaced to see what had been happening in the real world while I had been trying to see where my emotions would end up, to no conclusion. Bert had pushed another sword through a hole in one of the upright supports at chest height and the point was advancing towards the tip of my nearest breast. "Hey!" I cried, "Won't that put a hole in my top?" "Well, yes, but there are already have two holes," he said, demonstrating his point by clouding my mind further, with a quick pull and then push of the sword through my belly bottom. Before I could object he stabbed the tip of the sword through my nipple. While a small part of my brain was shocked by this development, most of the rest was busy trying to process the pleasure being inflicted on me; it felt almost overwhelming. The sword passed through my other nipple, after a short pause during which Bert made sure of his aim. Of course, the pleasure intensified and I was closer to being overwhelmed.

Natasha: I glanced over at the box of swords and saw just the one sword left and I knew where its planned home was. My open eye went wide as he approached me with the last sword and placed it against the front of the saddle. As he began to push, he said, "This may not be the best experience of your magical career, but I guarantee you, it will be a long time before you have another experience as intense." I felt the pressure build as the point passed through my shorts and then my panties and then I passed into me. I had heard from friends, some with boyfriends and some not, about orgasms and how there was fireworks and intense rapture, but there descriptions didn't do justice to what I was feeling. With the previous piercings I was skating round the edge of a pit of pleasure, waiting to swallow me up. With the final piercing I dived straight in and experienced a magiphoria-enhanced orgasm; the fireworks were there, but not just a simple display, but the combined New Year's fireworks from around the world and the rapture was so intense you could have done just about anything to me and I wouldn't have noticed. The feelings left my brain reeling and it rescinded control of my body to my reflexes and automatic systems; I slumped only held in place by the frame and the swords through me.

Natasha: When the high of a magiphoric orgasm subsided enough that I was once more aware of the room, Bert asked, "Would you like be my assistant, Natasha?" "Ask me again when I am standing on my own feet, with no swords through me." Some piece of my brain, probably the bit that wanted to be a lawyer, had heard about stuff, usually drugs, that made you feel good until they went away, when you felt so bad you wanted to die or worse. Bert took out all the swords with brisk efficiency; the feeling of having a sword removed was more like relief than the withdrawal of pleasure. With the swords gone, Bert removed the neck restraint and offered his hand to assist me dismounting from the saddle and steady me when I was on my own two feet.

Me: I guess that was when you said yes to being an assistant in 'The Wonder Show'.

Natasha: Actually, no. I looked down and saw the mess he had made of my clothes and asked if he had something for me to change into. Once I had changed, I told him I would have to sleep on it; mum always said, "If you have a big, life changing decision to make always sleep on it." While we waited for dad to come back, Bert put me through some of the other illusions he had under the excuse of trying me out in them. To tell the truth, I experienced several thousand times more excitement and pleasure in that afternoon with Bert than I had in ten years with my dad. When dad got back we were taking a break in a mismade routine, so that I could drink a soda through a straw on the table with my head, while Bert reassembled the rest of my body. The following day, after school I rang Bert and said yes.

Stagehand [knocking on Natasha's dressing room door]: The buzz saw is set up for rehearsal, Miss Natasha. Ready when you are.

Natasha [calling to the stagehand]: Alright, I'll be right there.

Natasha: It has been good to talk about the past. Thank you for giving me a change of pace.

Me: Thank you for fitting me into your hectic schedule.