Meeting up Again with Richard, the Orlando Street Magician

In the fall of 2015, we were visiting our daughter and attended one of her Paint Nite classes. Afterward, we stopped by a downtown bar and were treated to a first class magic show by Richard Waddington – whose street magician name is Richard the Adequate.

After seeing his show – and asking him a ton of questions – I friended him on Facebook. I didn’t hear anything until nine months later, shortly after the Orlando mass shooting, when I received a note that he had accepted my friend request. He apologized that he hadn’t seen my friend request. We exchanged messages and then text messages, and I told him about the blog post I’d done on him last fall and gave him the link.

His response: I’m speechless. You have honored me beyond words. Thank you. This week has been a bad one for us all. Tears of joy are so much better than tears of grief. You paid attention to my banter. Most people just watch my hands and ignore my mouth. What touched my heart the deepest was that you researched in addition. Are you a journalist?

This led to another exchange of messages where I explained that Rob and I are writers and learned  that Richard is an avid reader who devours 2-4 novels a week. Stephen King is at the top of his list and he has read most of King’s books multiple times. Richard is also writing a book and asked if I would take a look at the first chapter. I told him sure and he sent it along.

My sense is that he’s writing a memoir. He has a clear, unusual voice and a big life story – an unusual childhood in which his grandmother was a powerful influence, the loss of everything in 2006, when he ended up living under a bridge, and how magic brought him back. At any rate, I told him we would be in Orlando the following week and would love to see him perform more magic.

We met up with Richard after Megan’s Paint Nite class in a burger joint downtown. I had brought him one of King’s Dark Tower books that he said he hadn’t read, and then commented on the Bernie Sanders button on his hat, which led to the four of us talking politics. His grasp of political history is staggering. Name a president, any president, and he’ll talk about that presidency as though he was there. His grasp of religious doctrines spans the spectrum. As a young boy attending a Catholic church, he was abused by a priest and this incident launched a journey of voracious reading about every major religion and led him to the point where he is now an atheist.

When we got around to the topic of his magic, he whipped out his deck of cards and dazzled us with his wizardry. He even showed us how he does one of his card tricks but when Rob and I talked about it today, we realized neither of us understood it. He also did a very cool trick with 3 coins – a quarter, a British coin, and a Chinese coin that looked like a coin from the I Ching. He puts the three coins in his left hand, asked Megan to name one of the coins, opened his right hand, and there was the coin she’d named.

When Megan’s roommate, Nick, joined us, Richard really entered his street magician mode, blindsiding Nick with a couple of card tricks. I asked Richard for his birth data – he was born on the same day as John Lennon – and he gave me what I needed to do his chart. He’s a skeptic, but is “open-minded.” I told him I would send him some notes on his birth chart and that when he read it, he would no longer be skeptical about astrology.

Then it was time for Richard to head out to other sidewalk venues for the evening, where he would undoubtedly dazzle and entertain and blow a lot of minds. He left us with a piece of wisdom. “Magic is like politics. You distract the bystanders so they don’t see the truth of what you’re doing.”

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