Magic
Continued from Page 21
his “performance edge,” as he calls it. It was “real standard
issue stuff ,” ropes, rings, cups and balls, parlor tricks and card
manipulation, along with a few jokes. By the time he left for
Albright College, he was good enough to win a talent show. Th at
was a big victory for him; he became the magic guy on campus.

“Everybody wants to be known for something, I guess,” he said.

Aft er transferring to Drexel University, he’d go down to
Headhouse Square on Saturdays and watch a couple of talented
street magicians who introduced themselves as Penn and Teller.

Malissa and his friend Larry would juggle knives with Teller aft er
the show, which is not a “chop-it-up” or “shoot-the-breeze”-like
euphemism; they literally juggled knives together.

Malissa continued to improve as a magician. He started doing
his own street show, and won a contest put on by the Philadelphia
Houdini Club. Th e prize: a lithographic plate of the man himself,
donated to the club by his wife, Bess. A few months aft er he
graduated from Drexel, where he had begun the engineering work
that would become his career, Malissa traveled to Europe, hopping
from hostel to hostel and busking on the street. In Europe, Malissa
said, street magic and performance is considered to be closer to art
The area’s
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than stylized begging, as it is in the states.

Malissa came back and began his career as an engineer in
earnest. He met his wife, Ellen, and they had a few children. He
took a long break from performance, but eventually came back to
it, performing regularly in Doylestown and Princeton. He joined
the Society of American Magicians (Mid-Atlantic region, Assembly
#4). He has plans for a magic walking tour of Philadelphia, an idea
picked up from a fellow magician in Bath, England.

Th e thrill of winning contests and the pleasures of perfor-
mance are rewards in themselves, Malissa said.

“But then eventually, you realize, you really bring joy to
people. It can do that. And when you mature to that level, and
you realize, that’s the value of it, then you feel you’re doing some-
thing, in your own little way. If you can bring some joy to people,
you feel pretty good about that.”
Magic, he said “is a hobby that carries you into these wild
experiences, if you let it.” l
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22 MAY 14, 2020
THE GOOD LIFE
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM



Pushing 80, Mike Tabor
Is Still Pushing Himself and
the Cause of Jewish Farming
BY ARNO ROSENFELD
Kamada Kaori / iStock / Getty Images Plus
O n the wrinkled sheet of paper, a black-and-white Mike
Tabor looks away from the camera with a grimace.

Th rough the graininess of the tiny photograph you can
make out his full beard and shock of white hair jutting out from
under a baseball cap. Th e photo accompanies a dense block
of text that starts: “Michael Tabor — Tireless activist, organic
farmer, justice-seeker, husband, father. Th e ultimate pot-stirrer.

A non-conformist.”
But unlike most obituaries, this one is written in the present
tense. And Tabor is seated at his dining table, looking at the piece
of paper.

Last winter, Tabor went to the doctor with back aches. Routine
tests fl agged an irregular heartbeat and Tabor was hospitalized.

He quickly underwent surgery to replace a damaged heart valve,
a procedure that requires “turning off ” the heart for several
minutes. Tabor didn’t know if he would live.

At some point during the eight-hour surgery, Tabor said that
he perceived a conversation in which God asked what he’d done
with his life to make his children proud and to make the world
a better place.

Th ough the recovery has been long, Tabor, is back to holding
court in his Maryland home and overseeing the vegetable harvest
at Licking Creek Bend Farm in southern Pennsylvania. In many
ways, it’s business as usual for the 79-year-old Tabor, who has
split his time between the farm and home since the 1970s.

But the brush with death spurred Tabor to start putting his
life down in writing, attempting to answer the question posed to
him during the surgery: What has he done with his life?
See Farming, Page 24
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM THE GOOD LIFE
Photo by David Stuck
MAY 14, 2020
23