Oceanside-raised magician starts business to live his dream

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“Cards are the easiest thing to carry around,” said professional magician Michael Rossetti while sitting in the back of Panera Bread in East Meadow. “I have four hours of material with a deck of cards.”

I asked him to show me a trick. He rifled through his pockets and backpack, but couldn’t find any cards.

Instead, he pulled out a handful of half dollars. “They’re from 1908, so there’s no JFK on them,” he said. “Someone said they’re worth like 15 bucks, but they could be lying.”

He took off his tungsten wedding band and began to expertly flip one of the Lady Liberty-faced coins between his fingers. The coin became a blur as it danced atop his fingers.

Rossetti, 28, an East Meadow resident who grew up in Oceanside, developed a passion for magic at age 8, when his grandparents took him to see David Copperfield perform. Afterward, his grandfather taught him a handful of card tricks, and for years, he said that he would perform at every major family event, but never showed his tricks to anyone else.

“I’ve never been shy, except when it came to magic,” Rossetti said about that point in his life. But when he was 14, he tried his hand at performing in public. “There’s only so many times you can show your dad the same trick,” he said. “I wanted to see if I was actually any good.”

He started by walking around the Sands Shopping Center and showing card tricks to anyone who was willing to watch. Then he tried Roosevelt Field Mall, and the arcade at the Nathan’s Famous Hotdogs in Oceanside, where he would hang out after school.

At 16, Rossetti showed some of his material to the photographer and disc jockey at his brother’s bar mitzvah. They paid him $200 to perform at a wedding the next week.

“Why would I do anything else if I could get paid to do this?” he asked.

Soon after, Rossetti printed his first business cards, and began performing magic professionally. He persisted with the art through college while studying business finance and management at SUNY New Paltz, and continued after graduation, until the student loan payments started coming in.

“I have this degree,” he thought. “I might as well use it.”

He became a financial advisor for Kuttin Wealth Management in 2011, but after five years in finance, he decided to leave his job last July to perform magic full-time. “I always regretted not giving magic the full chance it deserved,” he said.

Rossetti did so while preparing to get married in October. “[It’s] a fun time to leave a job while you’re planning a wedding,” he remarked. “I say fun with the utmost sarcasm.”

Now he performs at weddings, bar mitzvahs, trade shows, banks — anywhere someone will pay him to perform. Most recently, he performed at a trade show in Holtsville on Feb. 4, where he showed off his tricks to handfuls of strangers.

“I thought I was going to see a regular card trick, but I’ve got to say, that was pretty extraordinary,” said Ron Fried, who works at a Long Island based media company. “It definitely made my day.”

“He was so good,” said business coach Lee Munch. “I don’t know how he did what he did. It was amazing.”

Rossetti won’t do children’s parties, though.

“Why do people like magic?” he asked. “It’s that feeling of astonishment.” As people get older they become accustomed to how the world should work, he said, but when they see something they can’t explain, “it brings you back to that blank state. It’s like feeling like a kid again.

“Kids are already kids,” he continued. “They’re too good for me.”

Instead, he hires people who specialize in children’s magic — a different style of performing — in hopes of expanding his business.

“Building a business is creating systems to help other people be good at what you do,” he explained. In lieu of cloning himself to be in multiple places at once, he said he wants other entertainers to do what he does at his level of quality, and in situations where he might not be as well suited.

Ultimately though, Rossetti said it’s all about entertaining people. He added that he specializes in up-close sleight of hand and mentalism — tricks of the eye, as well as mind reading and memory tricks — but those are only a fraction of the performance.

“The actual mechanics of the trick are not important,” he said. “It’s the story you tell with it. It’s the emotional impact you can add to these pieces of cardboard.”