Bullet Proof Man

For anyone who watched “The Prestige” and wondered if turn-of-the-century vaudeville magicians really died in tricks-gone-awry, the answer is yes. While reading the Houdini bio recently, I came across the story of “The Bullet Proof Man”. His act was wearing a suit filled with pockets of ground up glass and having a guy from the audience come up and shoot him with a gun and he’d “take” the bullet and not get hurt…er…until a wiseguy shot him in the groin (where the suit didn’t protect him) and he died. When Houdini went to London for the first time, he took the Bullet Man’s vacated spot on the bill. (And no, none of the tricks in The Illusionist ever went wrong, but I still liked it much more than The Prestige) — fog