Our great sage Johnny Mercer wrote, “Go out and try your luck / You might be Donald Duck / Hooray for Hollywood.” But Ricky, as the Stoics taught, did not enter that race. He achieved fame and adulation, but like the warrior monk or the Hasidic master, he sought perfection.
He spent five or six hours a day practicing. He did it for 60 years. And, like all great preceptors, he was, primarily, a student. His study was the metaphysical idea of Magic, which found expression not only in performance, but in practice, commentary, design and contemplation. They were all, and equally to him, but expressions of an ideal.
His teachers, like those of the great priests and rabbis, were the long dead — Matthias Buchinger, Johann Hofzinser, Max Malini, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin. These magicians of past centuries were, to Ricky, at least as real and present as his friends, and much more so than anyone outside our number.
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In performance, Ricky was like Glenn Gould, the heaven-sent performer of Bach, who played with such perfect simplicity that all who heard remarked not “what a great performer,” but “what magnificent music.”
—David Mamet
—from “David Mamet on Ricky Jay, a Great Astonisher and ‘Truest Friend’” [archive]
—found in The New York Times (November 28, 2018)