This is how memory works, Lorayne always insisted in his tutorials: You can’t recall anything if you don’t pay attention in the first place. “This could not happen if I weren’t listening - I mean really listening - to them.” But he had stumbled on a way to “relieve that loneliness just a bit.” The key was to look outward, with a wide-open mind: “I have never yet met anybody, from any walk of life, from whom I haven’t learned something,” he explained. “We are all, each and every one of us, completely and irrevocably alone,” Lorayne wrote. But a passage from his 1961 book, “Secrets of Mind Power,” revealed, fleetingly, a philosophical side as well. He’s remembered as a showman, a salesman, an evangelist - a relentless workaholic who spoke in a quick, slick word cloud of canned anecdotes, wisecracks, sales pitches and boasts. “We have potentially brilliant surgeons out on the streets here who will never become doctors,” he once griped, “because they can’t remember enough to pass the tests.” Forgetting was a barrier remembering was a key. But Lorayne seemed focused, most of all, on providing an edge to ordinary businesspeople and students. His celebrity students included Anne Bancroft, Alan Alda and Michael Bloomberg. He wrote more than 20 books on memory training and produced a slew of other educational materials. He worried people would mistake his memory feats for just another trick instead of a thoroughly teachable skill. But Lorayne was always wary of outing himself as a magician to the general public. (? A review of a new biography of Agatha Christie, Lorayne said, then relayed the review’s headline, the author and publisher of the biography, the book’s page count and retail price too.) He was also a renowned magician, a master of close-up card tricks a video produced in 2016 for his 90th birthday featured tributes from giants of modern magic like David Copperfield and Penn & Teller. Merv Griffin once quizzed him on the contents of an issue of Time magazine. He recited sequences of random numbers, random words. Lorayne later revealed that, after successfully reciting the names of several hundred people during a rehearsal earlier that day, he was dismayed to watch that audience exit the studio and a throng of completely different faces, with completely different names, file in for the actual show. And in fact, the stunt on “Ed Sullivan” was twice as hard as it looked. He called them out authoritatively, like God naming the animals, but also unthinkably fast, like an auctioneer, or an auctioneer attending to last-minute bids while fleeing a fire. Michael Newman.” This was his signature showstopper: having met everyone in the studio just before airtime, he was now reciting their names. During one of his first high-profile gigs, in August 1964, he roamed the aisles on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” pointing at audience members one by one. He was a fixture of late-night television, making two dozen appearances on Johnny Carson’s show alone. He would remember how to remember for the rest of his life. An apple is landing on Mary’s head: An-apple-is. Studying for one quiz, for example, Harry found that he could remember the capital of Maryland - Annapolis - by picturing an apple falling on the head of a classmate named Mary. Prime among them was the use of “mnemonic pegs,” whereby you encode abstract information into concrete images. Harry became flooded with anxiety, his stomach clenching every morning before school.Įventually, he sought out books on memory training and discovered techniques dating back centuries. And each time he failed, his father hit him. Around age 10, finding that he couldn’t keep straight any of the material being taught to him in class, he kept failing his daily quizzes. His father then jumped out of his 16th-floor hospital room and died.) Instead, Harry was beaten - with seething regularity. (When he was 12, his father took ill and reached down to embrace Harry, who was asleep on the couch, before he left for the hospital. “I could have been a stranger in the house,” he once recalled. He was never taught to brush his teeth and did not even discover tooth-brushing, as a concept, until he was a teenager. Neither parent ever told him they loved him. He often described his parents as “professional poor people,” and his childhood was subsumed in a bleak form of emotional poverty, too. Harry Lorayne grew up Harry Ratzer, in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |