“Boys and girls! May I have your attention? Let’s come to order, people!” That didn’t work, so she picked up the whistle around her neck and blew it. “Everybody, we need to take our seats at the table again! So the show can begin!”

The show? Ah, so that’s what that curtain thing was-I thought it was for some new educational game. It was a circular, upright contraption, like a very small shower enclosure, surrounded by a colorful patterned curtain made from a sheet. Was Sam in there? I couldn’t smell him, but my senses were overloaded. He’d disappeared into the house a few minutes ago, so I really should’ve known.

Hmm. Was this a good idea? Benny wasn’t five anymore. What if, instead of making him proud, his magician father embarrassed him? And Sam always said magic was 10 percent technique, 90 percent presentation-how was he going to present himself as anything other than the neighborhood guy most of these children had known all their lives? How could he make magic out of what he’d always been to them: Benny’s dad?

Monica was the emcee. After she got everybody settled, a magic trick in itself, she launched into a rousing introduction to whip up excitement, winding up with, “And now… I present to you… the amazing… the incredible… The Great Sambini!”

She pulled the curtain back with a flourish to reveal-nothing. She gasped, looked horrified, tried it again. “The Great… Sambini!” Nothing. Third time’s the charm, and I had to admit she had the kids going by now-worried but not too worried. “The Great… Sambini!”

A puff of smoke, and Sam appeared-from behind a second colorful patterned sheet, I assumed, but the effect was too fast to see. Out he strode, coughing, waving his hands at the smoke. He didn’t look like himself. He’d moussed his hair into alarming tufts and spikes that shot out all over, making him look beyond eccentric, possibly insane. He wore turquoise and gold striped pants and a gold vest, high-top sneakers, a polka-dot tie. One shirttail hung out under the vest, and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses kept slipping down his nose. Okay, he was a sort of wizard nerd, but the image didn’t gel. He was still Sam, until he started talking.

“Mmm, good afternoon, ladies and germs,” came out in a nasal, adenoidal drone, followed by more coughing and silly noises like “Bleh! Haw. Brak.” “Allergies,” he explained, pulling a yellow handkerchief from his pocket and waving it at the smoke. “I mmunderstand it’s somebody’s birthday? Who would that beee? Who is the birthday mmperson today?” he wondered in the tenor nerd voice, nervous and sweet, a sound I’d never heard come from his mouth before.

“Me.” Benny raised his hand, grinning, blushing.

“Me? No, oh, no, mine’s in April, I’m almost sure.”

“No!” said Benny, laughing with the others. “It’s my birthday.”

“Oh, you. Well, I knew that-I am, mmm, the Great Sambini! Now, don’t tell me-your name is mmm…”

“Benny!” the kids shouted.

“No, no, starts with a Q. Mmm, I mean J, starts with a J. It’s… Joaquin?”

“No, Benny!”

“No, no, that’s not it. Don’t tell me; the Great Sambini knows all. Mmm, your name is…” He pressed his fist to his forehead. “Montague.”

“No,” they shouted, “it’s Benny!” giggling but spell-bound. Like me, they knew it was Sam, and yet it wasn’t Sam. It didn’t hurt that while he talked he kept making wild efforts to get rid of the scarf, but it seemed to be glued first to one hand, then to the other.

“Benny? Really? Mmm, if you say so. Happy birthday, Benny. How does it feel to be thirty-n ine?”

“Six.”

“Six!” The Great Sambini went closer, squinting at Benny through the horn-rims. “Here, hold this.” Benny took one end of the scarf, and when Sam backed up, a dozen more came with him, like a string of yellow sausages between their two hands. “Hey,” Sam exclaimed, “how’d you do that?”

“You did it!” the children shouted.

“I did it? Oh, I seriously doubt that. Here, I’ll, mmm, take those.” He reeled the silks back, stuffing them into one closed hand and opening it to discover, in more apparent amazement, they were gone. “Why, you, you scarf thief,” he blustered. “Luckily the Great Sambini knows where you hid them. Aha!” Little Justin Carr jumped in delight when Sam yanked another long parade of scarves out of his ear. “Thieves and pickpockets, mmm, tsk tsk tsk, what are they teaching our young people these days?” He kept stuffing scarves into his pants pocket-but of course, the more he stuffed, the longer the string grew. “Quit it,” he ordered Justin. “Quit that, I say,” which cracked the kids up. His fussbudgety irritation tickled them, and they loved being in on the joke that his incompetence was feigned. They knew they were, literally, in good hands.

Sam made more scarves appear and disappear, multiply and divide, he made a blue and white scarf turn into a blue and white striped scarf, on and on, and somehow each trick was a conspiracy against him. The kids were doing them, not the Great Sambini, who was getting more and more steamed. Suddenly his aggravated face cleared. “No wonder! Of course!” He slapped his forehead. “I forgot my magic hat! Can’t do a thing without it.”

Out came a flat red disc from an inside pocket. He took a deep breath. “Magic air,” he peeped in a squeaky voice, then blew on the disc. It inflated into a red felt homburg. Which fell off his spiky-h aired head as soon as he stuck it on. Much hilarious hat schtick ensued, Chaplin-i nspired, and tricks with a wand-cane I’d never seen him do before.

In fact, this whole act was new to me. Sam had done gigs at trade shows, adult parties, once a cruise ship, where he appeared variously as Sam Summer, Magician; Milo Marvelle, Master of Mystery; The Prodigious Presto, Prince of Prestidigitation (“but you can just call me Your Excellency”). I’d seen bits and pieces of all of them, and occasionally the whole act in front of a live audience. And I never really got it. Magic was silly, wasn’t it? Because there’s no such thing. Not that Sam wasn’t good. Prospero the Prince of Magic was smooth, suave, sexy, confident, everything you could want in a magician-if you wanted a magician. I never had.

Now I was starting to get it. He hadn’t picked the persona of a blowhard or a clown or a doofus for these kids. He was more of a disgruntled Peter Pan, a grown-up child as enchanted, under the aggravation, with the wonderful things he could do as they were. As the act went on even his face changed, lost years, lost strain, and his body seemed to grow suppler and more agile. As a result, eight six-year-olds became rapt and obedient, no jeering or mouthing off, not a single wise guy. Just laughter and wonderment.

I couldn’t laugh, but I could wag my tail when Sam botched the coin vanish, and especially the disappearing egg. The kids laughed so hard, Kayla Logan fell out of her seat. I stopped wagging, though, when Sam pulled two yard-l ong pieces of cord from a pocket and announced he needed two volunteers for his final and extremely difficult trick, Magic Handcuffs.

He picked Allen Hansen and Ethan Carr, Justin’s twin. “Watch carefully! Don’t blink!” he instructed as he tied knots with the cords around four little wrists, stringing the cords together in the process so that, when he finished, Allen’s rope hung in a loose loop around Ethan’s.

“Are you stuck? Try to get away from each other. Nope, they’re stuck. But! Mmm. If they’ve got magic, mmm, mojo, they will miraculously break free! We’ll give them one minute! You have one minute to get free. You can do anything but you cannot untie the knots. Ready? One minute, starting… now. Go!”

They started out self-consciously, testing the ropes with tentative moves like putting their arms around each other from the back, the front. But frustration, crowd laughter, and Sam’s constant countdown-“Thirty more seconds! Twenty-fi ve! Twenty-f our!”-soon had them in a heap on the ground, thrashing and wrestling like kittens, arms and legs tangled. Allen lost a shoe. Everybody thought it was a riot, everybody but me. I knew where this was heading.