A stocky man in a black suit and red sport shirt is walking through the dining rooms of the Stage House Tavern in Scotch Plains, checking out the people at the tables. He could be the manager; a guy looking for his pals; an undercover cop looking for a perp. He is, in fact, a close-up magician, a specialist whose stage is the corner of a restaurant table.
His name is Mark Zacharia, and he is in his 11th year of being paid to astonish Stage House customers every Thursday from 6 to 9 pm. On this evening, he spots two young girls sitting with their parents. They have just given the server their order. “My job is to turn wait time into fun time,” he says. “The minute the menus come off, they’re fair game.”
Zacharia approaches the table and seamlessly inserts himself into the conversation. His patter is faster than the ear in the same way the hand is quicker than the eye. In seconds, the girls and their parents are laughing. Zacharia threads a red ribbon through three antique coins, each with a square hole in the middle. He holds the two ends of the ribbon in one hand so the three coins dangle between the girls’ faces. Then, with his free hand, he gently removes the center coin without disturbing the ribbon or the other coins. The girls squeal with delight.
Moving on, he stops at a table where a middle-aged couple has just ordered. He pulls five crisp $1 bills from his pocket and shows them both sides. They nod, unfazed. He flips the bills and suddenly they are $100s—on both sides. They laugh. “Thanks very much, there’s our dinner,” says the woman, reaching out her hand. The magician instantly turns the bills back into ones, offering regrets that $5 won’t even buy an appetizer.
Zacharia is just warming up. He spots a couple who come here several times a year from Brooklyn just to see him. With nearly 500 tricks in rotation, Zacharia rarely repeats himself. Tonight, he fans a deck of cards in front of the couple, Bob Higgins, a retired Brooklyn fireman, and his wife, Susan, an attorney. Susan picks a card, looks at it and returns it to the deck. Zacharia shuffles the cards so half are face up, half face down. The next two things that happen justify the name of Zacharia’s website, youwillbelieveinmagic.com. Closing the half-and-half deck, he instantly reopens it and all the cards are face down. He then turns the deck over. Every card but one is face up. Susan removes that card. It’s hers.
Zacharia, 56, got interested in magic as a kid, “dropped it in high school—I discovered girls,” then put the two passions together at age 30, charming the woman he would marry by doing a magic trick for her over dinner. After a career as an editor and publisher of trade magazines, he got a master’s in education at Kean University and, since 2004, has been “a proud Parsippany High School English teacher.” He performs tricks for his students once a year, on the last day of school.
Close-up magic in restaurants has always been his specialty. In addition to the Stage House, he currently appears every Sunday, 6 to 8 pm, at Boxcar Bar & Grill in Short Hills, and 5:30 to 8:30 pm the third Friday of each month at the Hat Tavern in the Grand Summit Hotel in Summit.
“It never gets old,” he says.
How could it, when he has this showstopper up his sleeve? He does it at the Stage House for Amy Levine, a Weichert real estate agent in Westfield coming to see him “for the ninth or tenth time. You can’t find entertainment like this anywhere,” she says.
Zacharia has her pick a card, sign it and put it back in the deck. At the same time, he places a drawstring velvet bag on the table. He shuffles the deck, hands it to her, and asks her to deal as many cards as she likes, then turn the next one over.
Levine deals half a dozen cards, face down, then decides to turn the next one face up.
It’s hers. She gasps, astounded. So does her friend, who she has brought with her to see Zacharia for the first time.
The magician could have stopped right there. Levine and her friend—also this writer and a photographer—are bound in total bogglement. After all, she alone held the deck, dealt the cards and decided when to turn the next one over.
But this is mere prelude. Zacharia picks up the cards and reshuffles. Now he fans the deck, face up. After a careful inspection, Levine determines that her signed card is nowhere in the deck.
Zacharia points to the velvet bag and asks her to open it. She undoes the tight drawstring and pulls out something flat and cold. It’s a slim block of ice. Encased within it is her signed card.
She and her friend shriek with delight.
Zacharia later tells me that there is a technical term for a trick of this magnitude. “It’s called a triumph of magic,” he tells me. It’s like sticking an Olympic gold-medal winning dismount in gymnastics.
About two months after witnessing this trick, I call Levine and ask her about it.
“That drawstring was tight,” she says. “I have no idea how he got the card in the ice and then into the bag. He never touched the bag. It still flabbergasts me.”