COPPERFIELD DELIVERS HIGH-TECH MAGIC

Joyce McIntosh of Jackson was one of 13 people who vanished into the air above famed magician David Copperfield Wednesday night. She and the others reappeared 10 minutes after the show was over but she won't say where she went.

"It was pretty wild" was all she'd reveal despite the pleadings of her sons Stuart and Lucas.

The 6 p.m. show at the Show Me Center was one of two the famed magician performed Wednesday.

If Copperfield is the Houdini of the late 20th century, his show is at least as much a high-tech fantasy of light and sound and preening as it is a demonstration of old-fashioned legerdemain. But he knows how to put on a show.

How about handing out cards to the whole audience so that a basic magician's card trick can be transformed into a moment in which 4,000 people jump to their feet because Copperfield has made them all pick the same card.

Copperfield's critics, he acknowledges, say he can't get through a performance without some pretty ladies, some smoke and wind blowing in his hair. Just to prove them right, Copperfield performs an illusion called "The Fan," a backlit fantasy with a backbeat in which a windblown Copperfield poses provocatively with a lovely young woman wearing a diaphanous gown before he appears to walk through the blades of an industrial-size fan.

The Lothario role Copperfield plays can cross the line, especially before a family audience. The jokes and body language that accompanied the trick in which he supposedly switched the underwear of two young teen-age girls bordered on inappropriate.

But he also is capable of doing the seeming impossible, changing places with one of his assistants who one moment was on the stage and the next was in a cage far above, or seeming to disappear from the stage and reappearing halfway out in the audience moments later.

The latter was a favorite of Debbie and Bill Kasting of Cape Girardeau. Meta and Art Siemers of Cape Girardeau brought binoculars, but he said he didn't see anything the rest of us missed.

She was impressed.

"I waited 67 years to see a great one," she said.

In the finale, McIntosh was one of 13 people randomly selected from the audience to come on stage to be seated on a platform that rises into the air before the curtain is whisked away to reveal their disappearance.

She and the others who disappeared met Copperfield backstage after the show and agreed not to reveal how the illusion was created. "He said we're part of his show," she said.

She was just glad her sons were old enough to know she hadn't really disappeared.

"I told my youngest if it had been two years ago he would have been upset," McIntosh said.