A Celestial Celebration
DEBBIE O'CARROLL
“The Irish Magic Show”
While Dell O’Dell would be an obvious choice for this installment, I’ve already written about her life and career at great length. So at the end of this article, I’ll just share one charming footnote to my research. Meanwhile, I’d like to feature another woman for the letter “O.” Like Dell, this lady delighted her audiences by mixing magic with an Irish heritage and a lively onstage persona (several of them, in fact). Born Debbie Clark on November 19, 1948, to an Irish-American family in Syracuse, New York, she married Tom O’Carroll, a singer, historian, and folklorist, in Dublin in 1973. And they soon became magical ambassadors for Ireland and America.
As a child, Debbie was “drawn to all the performing arts.” Her brother had a magic set from FAO Schwartz, and their parents were her first audience. Debbie studied Dramatic Arts at Emerson College and at Lesley University (then Lesley College), where she received her MA in children’s theatre. The first time she did magic professionally was in a local production of The Fantasticks, where she made a Fantasio cane appear. The audience reaction sealed her fate, and she began performing magic for pay the summer following her college graduation.
In addition to touring nationally as a children’s theater actress for 40 years, Debbie O’Carroll had a busy magical performance schedule. She was a favorite at schools, libraries, festivals, and other such venues up and down the east coast from Maine to Florida. For instance, the Savannah Irish Festival in Georgia wrote, “I would like to thank you for your delightful work at our festival. We have nothing but raves for your children’s entertainment.”
Versatility was one key to her success: she had so many different shows and workshops to offer. For example, “The Magic Library” was aimed at children aged 4-14 and featured Debbie as “Debra Cadabra,” who found herself in a library storage closet and used magic, costumes, and audience participation to bring books to life. Her “Yankee Doodle Magic Show” celebrated American history and culture, while the “Irish Magic Show” introduced characters from classical Irish literature. She and Tom also had a show together that enchanted young audiences with different aspects of Irish culture. Her “Small World” show introduced young audiences to the enchantment of London Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China, the Stone Circles of Ghana, the Taj Mahal, Blarney Castle and the Hagia Sophia.
O’Carroll did other shows based on math, geography, monsters, and holidays, and she also offered a variety of programs tailored to the needs of schools and other community groups, ranging from “Flower Power” to “The Planets Magic Show.” Her “Fun and Games” program used magic tricks to teach exercise and body movements. In yet another program, “Whoops the Wizard” employed stage magic to teach children about famous scientists and the magic of invention, and her “Railroad Magic Show” gave kids a whimsical tour of the United States. She also offered programs geared to senior citizens. And her versatility wasn’t limited to magic, either. Debbie gave workshops for children on comedy, origami, and yoga, and she was a Special Studies Instructor at the Chautauqua Institution beginning in 2010. On top of that, she taught dance, theatre and creative movement improvisation to adults in her hometown.
Debbie O’Carroll counted the late Ray Goulet among her mentors, stating that he encouraged her magic performances and her interest in magic’s past. That interest in history led her to develop an act inspired by Mrs. John Brenon, the first recorded female magician to perform in the United States. Very little is known about this late 18th-century performer, whose husband was a magician and rope-walker. While O’Carroll was creating the Mrs. Brenon character for the stage, she was also developing the story for a children’s book featuring a young Irish girl who loves magic, marries a magician, and performs in colonial America. Bridget Boylan, Girl Magician was published in 2007. It is a charming adventure story that teaches young readers about Irish history and culture while giving future magiciennes a plucky fictional role model.
Tom and Debbie O’Carroll lived in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and she served as the ring secretary for the Silent Mora IBM Ring in Boston for over 30 years. One career highlight was performing with Tom at the IBM Ring 85 convention in Limerick, Ireland, in 1997, where she and other magicians presented a special matinee for 25 children from Chernobyl, all of whom were in Ireland for cancer treatments. She was recognized for her artistry. In 2003 she was named New England Magical Entertainers Group Performer of the Year. Later, in 2009, she was presented with a Beacon Award from the City of Newburyport with recognition from the Massachusetts House of Representatives for inspiring youngsters through the art of magic.
Debbie lectured for magicians and presented at the SAM assembly in Boston in 2018. There she introduced her do-it-yourself props. She made her own change bags, egg bags, and Devil’s Handkerchiefs, which she sold at her lectures. When the lecture was written up in MUM, the reviewer praised her reworking of the Professor’s Nightmare using a jump rope as “hilarious fun.”
Years ago, in 1984, Debbie and her director/choreographer, Dollee Mallare, went to Amman, Jordan, to present school shows for two weeks. “Part of our contract,” she wrote, “involved teaching classes to Jordanian children’s performers. There were actors, puppeteers, mimes, and dancers in our workshop, as well as magicians. What a warm and welcoming group they were! We all performed together in a variety show in the Royal Cultural Center at the end of our tour. Some of the performers dramatized middle-eastern folk tales for this show, and it was a great way for us to learn and share the history and culture of the region.”
I’m sorry that Debbie never got to see “A Celestial Celebration.” She passed away on March 25, 2023, at the age of 74.
DELL O’DELL
As promised, I’ll end with a nice story about Dell O’Dell (1897-1962), whom Debbie O’Carroll cited as an inspiration. (You can also see Dell in action in The Screening Room.)
I spent eight years working on the biography Don’t Fool Yourself: The Magical Life of Dell O’Dell, which was published by Squash Press in Chicago in 2014. It tells the adventures of the larger-than-life performer who flourished in ten different branches of show business during her forty-year career, especially in her heyday of working popular night clubs in the Thirties, Forties and Fifties. From circus strongwoman to physical culture expert to vaudeville comic to television star, Dell was a brash, funny, and widely loved magician.
Not long after the book came out, I received a letter from a Sacramento man named Bill Etgen. His letter made my day, and I’m happy to share it here.
Dell O’Dell performed at our school on Staten Island in 1942 or 43. She was the biggest magic show I had ever seen—and the most memorable and influential. Her rabbits, clanking linking rings and magic boxes captured me in a unique way. I had ADD (according to my teachers) and exploded into motion every fifteen minutes in order to let off steam. They called me “Mister Lightning.” My folks called on all the child behaviorists they knew because I could not study or remember or stay on a topic—until I saw Dell O’Dell’s show.
That night I talked for over one hour solid about magic to my friend Tommy. My father was so impressed by this newfound focus that we went to a magic store that Saturday. I bought my first trick—the Hindu Prayer Vase—and he bought a Svengali deck. I practiced and focused on the moves and remembered the patter. Magic was my therapy of choice.
Bill goes on to describe effects from her show—the linking rings she clanged around, the loop pencils she tied into so many kids’ buttonholes, and even a visible block penetration that Bill later built for himself and shared with his frail grandfather, bringing a moment of wonder to the dying man. “Gramp’s last words to me,” Bill remembers poignantly, “were about a box trick à la Dell O’Dell.” He goes on in the letter to tell the story of putting together his own act and performing in college for a group of children who had been traumatized by various life experiences. His battery of sucker tricks did not get the usual reactions. In fact, the children did not react at all. Silence greeted him throughout and after the show. Bill thought he had failed.
The next day, the therapist who invited him to perform told him that as soon as he left, the kids started “crawling all over him,” talking about the show. “I know how he did that!” “That was the worst magician I ever saw!” The children went on and on. It sounds like a bad review, but it wasn’t. Some of those kids had not talked for over a year. Just as Dell had done for him, he had unlocked something for those young people.
Mr. Etgen has had a lifetime of happy experiences with his hobby, all made possible by his exposure to the Queen of Magic when he was a boy. “Magic is a wonderful medicine,” he says, “and I got my cure from the loudest, most poetic lady ever in this art. Thank you for bringing back those happy memories of childhood.”
“P.S. I finally cut my shirt to get her pencil off.”
This article first appeared in the August 2007 issue of The Linking Ring and appears here by permission.
Stargazing
While I have already started by adding to the letter “O” by spotlighting Dell O’Dell (1897-1962), I can also provide a few more. Amanda Oeser (1854-1932) was part of an Austrian dynasty of magicians in the late nineteenth century, while Eleanora Orlowa, “The Royal Trickster,” was from Germany. Okinu (1895-1980) assisted her Japanese husband Tenkai but was also a magician in her own right. Yvonne Otto (b. 1936) of Copenhagen, Denmark, made her magical debut in 1940 at the age of four and stayed in show business for about 15 years. Julia Ferret (1852-1916) performed as Okita in addition to being the partner, on stage and off, of famed Paris magic dealer Charles De Vere, and the mother to iconic magicieine Ionia (Clementine De Vere).
Omene (ca. 1869-1899) was the wife of magician Yank Hoe and began a solo career as a belly-dancer and later as a magician. The only known copy of a stunning three-sheet lithograph featuring her was sold at Potter & Potter Auctions in 2019. A performer named Olivette was a lightening calculator and electric lady from 1895 until around 1908. Mrs. Albert Smith was a mentalist as Madame Olga (1881-1964) in the “Mysterious Smith” show in the early twentieth century. Gwen Otto (1890-1985) was the wife of Harry Otto and performed as “Gwenott, Queen of Magic.”
Janet Oppenheimer of Riverdale, New York, broke into the magic business as a teenager in the late Sixties and early Seventies, having been a student of Clare Manley. Christine Omanis, from Blackpool, England, was active in the Nineties. Mikayla Oz of Des Moines, Idaho, is an up-and-coming magician busy working family events and theme parks around the country. Ronja Oja is a blind magicienne from Helsinki, Finland, and Ilkay Ozdemir is from Turkey. Marion Outerbridge, born in Germany, lives and works out of Smith Falls, Ontario, performing illusions alongside her magician husband Ted Outerbridge.