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Christina Perrone
Hometown Weekly Intern
We all know that keeping kids entertained requires some magic. Indeed, Matias Letelier, a magician in New York City, has made an entire career out of entertaining kids with exciting magic tricks and illusions. On Tuesday, July 27, kids of all ages came to the Wellesley Free Library to see Matias’ magic show despite a gathering tempest outside.
“So, let me introduce myself,” began Matias once the excited audience settled down, “For those who know me, my name is Matias. For those of you who don’t… well it’s still the same – Matias. And I have an accent, in case you didn’t notice.” Matias then proceeded to ask the kids where he got this accent of his. Popular answers included Poland, Scotland, India, China and Spain, all of which were wrong. Matias continued the guessing game by listing all the languages he speaks, Spanish, English, Portuguese and French. The kids were stumped, and as an aside, Matias joked, “I think I confused them even more.”
“If you like cherries, nectarines, plums, blueberries and grapes, say yeah!” encouraged Matias. “Well, let me tell you, if you like them, in the winter, in most places, if you try one of those, it came from my country, Chile.”
Before meeting his American wife Marlana in 2008, Matias had made a name for himself as a well-known magician. “She brought me back, and that makes me her souvenir from Chile,” said Matias as parents laughed. The two decided to get married in 2011. Since then, Matias has built his own entertainment business called NY Magician for Children that provides entertainment for children’s birthday parties, libraries, museums (including the Boston Children’s Museum of Science) and schools. Among his many accolades, Matias has been awarded Best Comedy Magician every year since 2012.
Matias developed his passion for magic at an early age: “When I was in my country, every single weekend, my parents drove me to my uncle’s house, who was an amazing magician. His name was George – George the Amazing,” Matias said with gusto. Every weekend, Uncle George showed Matias a new magic trick. “And one day I asked him, ‘Uncle George! Can you teach me to do magic?’ and you know what he said?”
His audience naturally assumed that this Uncle George agreed.
But Uncle George said no. “And I asked him, ‘Why not?’ and he said, ‘First, you must learn what magic is all about. [It’s when] we play with the imagination,’” said Matias as he set up for his first magic trick of the evening.
“Raise your hand if you don’t see magic here!” Matias shouted as he held an apparatus which appeared to be a cardboard tube with two pom-poms attached to each end. It was hard to anticipate what illusions he could make out of this simple, homemade tube. Matias claimed that this trick was the first and one of the most important tricks his Uncle George taught him.
“[Uncle George] said, ‘Now, pull the white one.’ And when I pulled the white one, that’s when the magic began,” Matias recalled. Once he pulled the white pom-pom, he managed to pull up the blue pom-pom on the other side of the tube, as if the two were connected with one string.
“And when I pulled the red one, things went too crazy, so I’m not going to show it to you,” said Matias, pretending to put the apparatus away. The kids, who became gradually more and more intrigued, shouted ‘NO!’ all at once. It was almost magic how he could captivate his young audience so early on in his performance. Unfortunately, good magicians never reveal their secrets.
“When I pulled the red one, it was connected to the white one, but the white one was connected with the yellow,” Matias continued, pulling the pom-poms with increasing frenzy, “But the yellow pom-pom was connected with the blue. And the blue one was connected to the red! And the red one was connected with the yellow! Everything was connected,” he said, his voice gradually raising to a crescendo as he pulled each pom-pom in every direction.
“Then he opened the center and showed me,” Matias said as he opened the tube, “that there was nothing in between … he said, ‘It was just your imagination.’ And that, my little friends, is how I discovered the magic of imagination.” The children gasped, their previous notions bashed.
When his Uncle George died, Matias was pursuing a bachelor’s degree in business. He inherited part of his uncle’s massive library of magic books (approximately 300 books by Matias’ estimate), and became consumed with reading all there was to know about magic theory. From this moment on, Matias decided to turn his hobbyist’s interest in magic into a career, incorporating the business skills he had learned in college.
One of the first tricks he learned from reading was how to make something disappear. “You need a paper bag that looks like this,” he said, raising a run-of-the-mill paper brown bag, “and then, it says you have to put something inside. Can you put your hand inside?” he asked one audience member in the front. “Now we’re going to make it disappear!” said Matias. The boy’s face grew pale before Matias laughed, “Maybe later, maybe later.”
Instead of making the audience’s limbs disappear, Matias resorted to putting an average Heinz ketchup bottle in the bag. He then asked the kids to say the magic word, which was Wellesley, before he proceeded to wrinkle the bag up into a ball, as if there had never been a ketchup bottle inside.
One of the oldest tricks in the books when it comes to performance is audience participation. Matias was sure to have plenty of opportunities for audience members to take part in his show. In his larger shows, Matias has been known to levitate volunteers. There were to be no floating children at Wellesley library this night, though. Rather, Matias and his young assistants faced the challenge of pulling a bunny from a wooden bucket.
To make Gafas the bunny appear, the children had to imagine the biggest wand they could. From behind the curtain, Matias came out with an inflatable magic wand the length of a small car. It took seven volunteers to hold the wand and after counting to three and shouting ‘Wellesley!’ Matias pulled a rather nonchalant Gafas.
After some other tricks, including a levitating table, Matias ended his show with a message for the young children. “When we use the imagination, we see impossible things,” started Matias, “And that’s the message of my show, because sometimes life is a little complicated … and we strive to find the answer, and no matter how many times we switch different things, we can’t find the answers. My message is when we use the imagination, we’ll be able to find the answer to all our problems and solve everything. And that’s the magic of imagination.”
And with that, Matias took a final bow while a resounding applause rose from the audience.
