There are lines in an old play that changed a woman in Albuquerque into a magician. Her name is Lisa Cousins. This was maybe 30 years ago. She loved to read, especially books about the spiritual realm, because when she’d given birth to her first child, the love she felt for him was so deep that she believed there must be more than the material world. In the first year of his life, she dreamt every night that she lost him. Then she’d find him again.
When he was ten, she read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1820 play “Prometheus Unbound,” which is about a network of mythological beings freeing a beloved son from a cruel punishment. It ends with a call to “hope till Hope creates/From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”
Many times she read it. Her son, she recalls, was reading about Harry Houdini. She recognized the beauty of the play in Houdini, a being who could escape any confine. So she trained to be a magician: she learned to turn white silk into colored silk, and to make a watch vanish from one of her wrists and materialize on the other, and to make a woman appear in a box…