Magic at the Mill: Larry Frates will charm young and old on Sunday

LACONIA — Inside the Belknap Mill, which houses the Larry Frates Creative Arts Studio, Frates, now 74, is demonstrating a crowd-pleaser. His assistant, Angel Stewart, a musician and former art student, steps into a tall, red box that resembles a cross between a coffin and a phone booth, with cutouts that reveal Stewart’s face, hands and one foot.

When the box is closed, blades are inserted, potentially cleaving her into pieces. Frates moves the box’s midsection to one side. Now there is wide swatch of air where her concealed torso used to be. It’s a discomforting picture.

Then Frates reassembles the box and opens the door.

“It really looks like I’m cut in three,” says Stewart, the proprietor of Main Street record store New Hampshire Vinyl, who emerges intact.

“It’s not real,” says Frates, who sums up the allure of this illusion — and the universal appeal of magic tricks: “People like to be surprised. In a sense, they like to be fooled in a nice way. People expect certain outcomes, and when it doesn’t happen, it’s fun.”

After a half-century of making art and enthralling viewers throughout the Lakes Region, most longtime residents know Frates’ name, and many have benefited from his skills as a painter, caricaturist and teacher. But fewer have witnessed his sleight of hand first hand.

For 50 years, Frates, who lives in Gilford, has performed magic tricks for children and adults, including Great Britain’s former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the queen mother — Queen Elizabeth’s mother — who he met around 1980 while teaching art in Scotland’s Orkney Islands on a Fulbright Fellowship.

Frates will perform selections from his repertoire at the Belknap Mill on Sunday, Oct. 16, at 1 and 3:30 p.m., to benefit the charitable works of Altrusa International of Laconia, the local chapter of the nation’s first business and professional club for women.

Frates’ illusions are geared for everyone in the family, he said.

“I try to misdirect you. My words might lead you in one direction while I’m trying to do something else.” Hardest to fool are children, he confessed.

“You say ‘Look over there’ to a child and the kid looks at your pointing finger, which is not what you want you want them to do," he said. "I give them a story, lead them down a path, then surprise them in a nice way."

Frates became hooked on prestidigitation when he was 11 and his uncle, a professional magician who appeared in Vaudeville shows, performed at his parents’ home. That sparked Frates’ research and acquisition of complicated magic skills, starting with balls under cups, a trick that involves moving and stacking foam orbs that disappear under moving cups, then reappear all at once.

For many years, the Laconia Putnam Fund supported Frates’ family-friendly gigs at elementary schools, including “Say No,” a show on how to avoid substance abuse; “You are the Magic,” on how to stand up to peer pressure; and “Drawing Us Together,” about kindness and standing up for others, which involved Frates drawing caricatures to illustrate the difference between laughing at someone and laughing with them.

His long-running menu of illusions have included “Ben the Bunny,” a trick he’s done for 40 years in which he talks about his rabbit named Ben, who retired and moved into a little yellow house with a blue door. Frates holds up a prop that resembles a painted wooden book, with doors that open and close. While manipulating it, he turns the painted bunny inside from white to red.

In another trick, he hands a succession of wands to eager little assistants, which fall apart in their hands. In another, he carefully places imitation phonograph records into protective sleeves, where they change color, then vanish. In another act, individual silk scarves magically become one with a multicolored pattern.

“These are little gags I like to use to take the edge off,” Frates said.

In his cellphone are a collection of photos from his dress-up days entertaining kids as the characters Safari Sam, Swami Salami and Yankee Doodler. Three years ago, Frates took his show to New Orleans, where he performed for Upturn Arts, and included a magic class.

Magic is a side of Frates that complements his interest in visual arts and audience engagement.

“It’s almost the same as doing a painting,” he said. “I’m trying to get people to see something happening. Not just look at it, but see it. If you spend a little time looking at a painting, you start to get a feeling. Magic takes you to a place where you’re fooled, but you’re happy to be fooled.”

Children will tell him, “Do it again! Do it again!” or “I think I know how you did that.” To which Frates replies, “Fine, then show me.” That quiets his audience temporarily.

The magician’s honor code states that “if you know how a trick is done, you don’t give away the secret,” Frates said. “You can go to the library and look it up. If you learn it, then you can fool somebody else.”

Frates, who studied visual art at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston with an emphasis on printmaking and art education, has amassed a slew of hall-of-fame credentials in his prestigious magic career, including memberships in the Society of American Magicians and the International Brotherhood of Magicians, where he recently was named to the Order of Merlin. In New England, he became an officer for the Black Richard Ring, named after America’s first Black magician from Potter Place, New Hampshire.

In 1981, Frates joined The Magic Circle of the British Magic Association after a pinnacle performance at the St. Magnus Festival in Scotland, where he had a surprise encounter with the British prime minister and queen mother.

“One lady in the audience raised her hand and I said to myself, ‘She looks so familiar.’” The audience chuckled when the woman said her first name was Margaret. Then she announced her last name: Thatcher. The conservative prime minister had one question for Frates, who was teaching in Scotland at the time: “Can you make the Labor Party disappear?”

Later, an envelope marked "10 Downing Street" arrived at Frates’ studio. It contained a signed photograph of the prime minister, with her message: “I’d like to thank you for your efforts and commend you for the outcome.”

For the past 20 years, Frates has called himself a “magical artist,” a role that has brought others joy and his life meaning. While working as an artist and educator in the Lakes Region, he started a magic club at Gilford Middle-High School when the building first opened in 1974. At its high point, 15 to 20 students joined and learned to perform assorted illusions for schools and nursing homes.

“They all had an act,” Frates said, “and it had to be different every year.”

For 15 summers, Frates appeared as Nascimento in Storybook Forest at Funspot, doing magic shows at 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. He said his then-assistant, Mindy Guild of Gilford, has guarded those magic secrets for the last 40 years, including from family members who continue to press, “How did you do it?”

Frates grinned. “She’s kept the secret that long and won’t tell them,” he said.

To purchase tickets for Magic at the Mill with Larry Frates on Sunday, Oct. 16, at the Belknap Mill, visit altrusalaconia.org. Tickets are $15 each, $10 for children under 12, and will also be available at the door. All proceeds will be returned to the community through Altrusa’s outreach programs, and each child attending will receive a free book.