Magic Touch

BLOCH IS ONE OF THE COUNTRY’S most successful labor arbitrators, with clients ranging from the National Football League and Major League Baseball to the U.S. State Department. The attorney can also turn a lighter into a flower, pop bowling balls out of sketchpads and wind a watch without touching it.

When he’s not umpiring labor disputes, Bloch is busy devising effects for his magic performances in the Dickens Parlour Theatre, the intimate 55-seat theater in Millville, Delaware, he built in 2010. Even before opening his own space, Bloch had made a name for himself as one of the magic industry’s best designers of effects, producing tricks for performers such as david copperfield and Siegfried and roy through his company, collec- tors’ Workshop. It was between meetings for his law practice that Bloch came up with his most ingenious tricks. “I’d run to a phone and call my partner when I had something,” Bloch says. “I just came up with these wacko notions, and he’d say, ‘Yeah, let’s make that happen.’”

It was the late Orson Welles who con- vinced Bloch to perform, dubbing him the “Edison of Magic.” Welles originally con- tacted Bloch for tips on one of his tricks, which Welles wanted to perform on The Tonight Show. For the next two years Bloch met with Welles monthly to develop tricks and give pointers for the auteur’s public ap- pearances. Bloch, in turn, admired Welles’ entertainment prowess. “It’s hard not to get bit by the theater bug sitting around with somebody like him,” he recalls.

Having two sides to his character is exactly the way Bloch likes it. “These two devotions provide a door I can walk through and take a vacation from one side to the other,” he says. “Finding that little door from time to time is an absolutely wonderful thing to do.”

Bloch has worked for years with his hyacinth macaw, Max, who still occasionally performs card tricks at private gatherings. <<<<

“ serious onstage. I was much more comfortable just having a good time up there.”