Joshua Jay on TODAY SHOW
Click the headline to watch Joshua Jay on the TODAY Show..
Joshua Jay and Anna Kloots: A Magician Marries His Assistant
The groom? The magician Joshua Jay. The bride? Anna Kloots, his magician’s assistant. When Mr. Jay, 33, appears in a straitjacket, Ms. Kloots, 26, pulls in people from the audience to check the integrity of his bonds and his blindfold.
That’s before “the two minutes or so it takes me to escape,” said Mr. Jay, who began performing magic at 8, and who now is an athletic 6-foot-3 and the embodiment of the handsome prestidigitator. (Some have mistaken him for Bradley Cooper.)
Afterward, Ms. Kloots, who quit her high-end sales job two years ago to tour the world with her globe-trotting conjurer, then helps him with performing other mystifying tricks. Read more…
A Box of Tricks, Studio Size..
SANDY KEENAN wrote this for the New York Times the last week of 2014. I had just begun my hiatus and missed publishing this nice article on the home, and magic, of Joshua Jay……..
Bondage devices have a casual place in Joshua Jay’s studio apartment in Chelsea.
Right there, out in the open, you can see metal thumb restraints, handcuffs of every ilk and a full-body straitjacket with leather straps.
“I guess I never realized how many sex toys we have around here,” said Anna Kloots, 25, Mr. Jay’s fiancée and assistant, “but these are all way too valuable to use.”
Mr. Jay, 33, is a magician whose home is also his archive for books and props that belonged to his heroes and predecessors.
He displays a pair of white gloves that were worn by Richard Valentine Pitchford, the British conjurer who practiced under the name Cardini. Mr. Pitchford honed his card tricks in chilly World War I trenches and became so accustomed to working with gloves, then unusual among magicians, that he continued to wear them throughout his long career. (Mr. Jay has his war medals, too.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/25/garden/a-box-of-tricks-studio-size-.html?_r=0