Meeting a magician is kind of like entering a funhouse — you never know what to expect.

Ben Robinson has caught bullets in his teeth. He’s trekked to Mount Everest, encounterd wild synchronicity and recorded his experience, and broken new trail with a career that largely defies categorization.

I met with Ben Robinson in New York during a respite from his almost constant traveling around the world giving shows. We sat down for 2 hours in September ’04 to discuss his last 30 years and the next 30.

– Kate Milliken

1. After 30 years, how do you feel about being a magician?

Wow. No small answer. Generally I love the work, and have realized it gets harder as you get older, which is the opposite to what I thought when I was 16. But, I also realize I am better at what I do as I get older. Having the trust of people I respect has been a gratifying experience. Seems artists I admire have mutual respect. One case in point is the show I did with the Jazz Mandolin Project at BB King’s earlier this year. I love their music, and I told their leader I had composed a piece of magic to his music. So, amidst waiters carrying trays backstage I showed it to him and he OK’ed me right then and there to join a song of theirs, to do magic while they played. It was a big moment for me because the audience did not expect to see a magician and they accepted me, even wrote on the band’s website message board that what I did was cool!

2. What has been your favorite experience?

Probably making a clinically depressed AIDS patient smile. I was engaged to do a Valentine’s show for the Center for Special Studies in New York. After the show the doctors asked if I would join a conference to help them break through to patients who were depressed, because I had broken through.

3. Favorite magician?

Well, two actually, the man I originally saw, Fred Kaps ­ the only magician to ever win the Grand Prix award three times successively. And then my good friend Johnny Ace Palmer, who I consider to be the greatest sleight of hand artist in the world. Johnny is also the first magician to ever win the Grand Prix as a close­up magician.

4. Is there a world’s greatest magician?

It is kind of like asking who is the greatest baseball player, Joe DiMaggio or Willie Mays? But I think when you add it all up at the end of the day, John Calvert gets my vote. He has performed in every country in the world except the USSR and lived more than one life, film star, adventurer and now he and his wife drive 1500 miles between one nighters in their trailer. At 93 he blows men out of the water 60 years younger. We will never see his kind again. Truly, not just a great talent with charisma, but a very uncommon spirit. He once told me, “Don’t worry, I’m a tough old bird.”

5. Favorite place you’ve been?

That’s hard. Immediately Amsterdam comes to mind because I have had so much fun there, one real vacation after months and months of shows where I double dated with a pal and with our girlfriends we toured the town and drank champagne by a canal, that was great. I also like Seattle a lot.

6. Greatest performance?

That’s easy. August 16, 2001 in Central Park with Rebecca Moore’s band. They played a song with their nine players set in a horseshoe pattern around me while I made things float, and changed the consistency of things while they were air born. Fighting the wind, being in the sunset, playing the band shell stage in front of 3000 people was very exciting. It is one of the few experiences that I was conscious of while I was doing it. I remember Rebecca kneeling down while the band played and looking upstage at me and I just felt this rush of warmth for her, what I was doing and appreciation that she had trusted me to appear with her. When it was over, we were backstage and she fell against a wall and said, “we just played Central Park.” For two New Yorkers, it was a special moment.

7. Favorite trick?

Yes, my ring trick. It represents almost my entire career because I began my career learning what a routine was through the prop this is based on.

8. Worst performance?

Well, there have been so many! Only kidding. I don’t know about ‘worst’ but I distinctly remember doing a show in Stockbridge MA, and after we had hit reviews, I walked backstage one night after the show, sort of slammed my fist down on the table and said to the stage manager, “Sort of lost them in the middle.” And the stage manager, not wanting to upset me further, just said, “Ah, don’t worry, I once saw George Harrison suck one night.”

9. Favorite city?

It’s a love-hate relationship, but nothing matches New York, no matter how much it is overbuilt and the taxes are out of sight.

10. Hardest thing you’ve ever done?

Travel up a slope from Phaking to Namche Bazar in the Himalaya. The ground was eroded and we were just going above the tree line and there was not a solid trail sometimes. I got very depressed because it was just day two of the trek and I thought I was going to have to stay behind.

11. Most amazing thing you’ve ever seen?

My parrot’s face when we were reunited after he flew away in New York City. I talked to Roy of Siegfried and Roy about this and he confirmed my suspicions about the innate talents of these incredible animals.

12. What’s been the biggest goal you set and accomplished?

When I was 14, I said to myself that I was going to have my own fully produced magic show when I was 27 just like Doug Henning had when he was 27. I had met Doug Henning on the first anniversary of The Magic Show on Broadway, and he was really clear with me in the meeting about how I should pursue a career as a magician. He also told me that he was a close up magician by training, a student of Vernon’s, and that he was not really a large scale illusionist, but in fact his career bore out his great talents as an illusionist. So, on July 5, 1988, at the age of 27 I opened in my show produced by the Music-Theatre Group in their summer series. That became the foundation of the hour-long show I do now.

13. How do you see your next 30 years?

I doubt I’ll be around for another thirty, but the one thing I can say is that we are in an interim period with the digital revolution. In 1995 I saw a TV screen that was just released on the world market a few months ago. At the same time, 1995, I also told friends in New York I had seen a friend attach a wireless phone to a laptop in the back of a car and trade stocks on the Japanese market. He did this in Seattle. The global village and the instant gratification of the internet has created people with real power at a very young age, I’m talking about 25 year olds. Problem is, these 25 year olds don’t have any manners or experience, just unbridled ego from early mastery of a temporary technology. This is new. As far as the art of magic, it will always be around, but it will take twenty years of magicians working honestly in representative media to correct the distrust built by those who used TV editing to create illusions in the past. I really don’t believe magic works in any other medium than being done live.