I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Several years ago, while looking for a film or a show to watch,

I came across Derek Delgado's one-man show in and of itself.

It wasn't a magic show, or stand-up comedy, straightforward storytelling there weren't card tricks or straight

jackets or shackles to escape from or doves or impossibly long handkerchiefs pulled from sleeves

no one was sawed in half i don't want to say too much about that show, or about Delgado's

memoir, a moral man, because I want you to watch and read for yourself. Both moved me deeply, and in ways I find hard to articulate. Derek Delgadoio has called

the one-man show a theatrical existential crisis, as opposed to a mere magic show. And I think that's

why I loved it so much.

It's singular.

I'd never seen anything like it, and I know I never will.

Both the show and the book recount important pieces of Delgado's childhood.

He was an outsider as a child, raised by a single mom.

You might think perhaps this is what drew him toward magic, something he could practice on his own.

But it's even deeper than that. In his work, Delgadoio also talks about his mother coming out as a lesbian in a conservative small town when he was six years old. Magic, he said, was a way to protect

himself from homophobic bullies. It is a powerful thing,

to have your own thing, to play a sport or an instrument, to have a talent or an activity

that helps you define yourself at a time in your life when you feel undefined, when you could

use some help moving through the world with more clarity, more inner strength, more definition.

For me, and maybe for some of you listening, that was poetry.

Being an introvert as a child is certainly what drew me to reading books, and eventually

writing poems of my own.

...