Is it magic to help turn someone's life around?
By Advance Business Capital 
The next time you’re passing through Georgia on I-75, you might take Exit 296 and pull into the Cartersville TravelCenter truck stop. The pie and coffee are as good as anyone’s, but the real attraction is the free magic act whenever illusionist Michael Anthony Mooney shows up to entertain his favorite audience: truckers.

The Great Escape
Mooney does the usual stunts: scarves from nowhere, mind reading, card tricks and pickpocketing volunteers. He does escape too. Once he did a show that climaxed the Castrol™ GTX Friday Night Drags at the Atlanta Motor Speedway. Blindfolded and handcuffed to a twenty-foot chain attached to a dragster, Mooney had just five seconds to get loose before the idling car took off, whether he was still attached or not. The MC started the countdown; the audience joined in; Mooney desperately struggled with his restraints; the red flag dropped and the car roared away just as—whew!—Mooney slipped off the cuffs.

We suspect that Mooney was out of his cuffs in the first couple of seconds and like his great predecessor Houdini, used the remaining moments to build tension and terror, but no matter, the crowd loved it and Mooney basked in the applause.

A Greater Escape
A roundish, bespectacled fellow with a short brushy chin beard, Mooney doesn’t exactly fit the traditional suave image of a professional prestidigitator, and his stagecraft, while capable, is unlikely to ever bump David Copperfield from the MGM Grand. However, he’s executed an escape few of his colleagues have equaled – and we’re not talking about the Atlanta Speedway stunt.

The product of a broken home and a childhood spent with a series of foster families, at the age of nineteen Mooney commenced a series of petty crimes that landed him in a penal farm, from which he shortly made his first (and ill-considered) escape. Soon recaptured, he was sentenced to extra time. All told, Mooney spent nine years hoeing, sowing, harvesting and, in his ample spare time, learning magic.

After release, Mooney hoboed for four years. During that time, he discovered that truck stops were reasonably hospitable places for the down-and-out. He made a point of keeping himself neat and groomed and having enough change to sit at the counter so he could make conversation and do tricks for kindly fellows who would give him a few bucks or a ride to the next stop. 

Message on a Napkin 
Life tales like this eventually go in one of two directions: either the guy slips back into bad company and worse straits or else finds redemption. In Mooney’s case, salvation came in some advice scribbled on a napkin by a man in a church where he’d taken refuge from a rainstorm. He got a job (hospital dietary aide), a small apartment and started doing magic shows for schools, birthday parties, charity events, the occasional trade show and once even opening for an act at a local comedy club.

Mooney’s forty-four now and when he’s not working or performing, you can find him at his second home, the Carterville TravelLodge™. He owes his turnaround, he says, to Jesus and truckers. He thanks Christ with a generous donation in the Sunday plate and repays truckers with vanishing coins, Kool-Aid from empty pitchers and so forth. Don’t ask him how he does it. Magicians have an inviolable code and Mooney can’t reveal his secrets even to the men who helped save him from himself.

Truck Stop Trouper
A man without a family, Mooney has found fellowship at church every Sunday and the rest of the week at the TravelLodge™. “In twenty years, you’ll probably still find me hanging around with truckers at truck stops,” he says. “I’ve always had a special relationship with them. Thank God for truckers.”

Amen. Now could you do that trick with the ping-pong balls again, this time slow?

You can check out Michael Anthony Mooney, “Christian Magician,” at his site, The Napkin Ministries.
This story was drawn from eTrucker, Overdrive.com and Randy Grider’s column in Trucker's News.

Advance Business Capital