Magician

Any Harry Potter fan can tell you that the life of a wizard isn’t easy, but Dorchester’s only professional magician confronts challenges the Hogwarts crew never faced.

Even though he has doubled as Dumbledore entertaining Muggles waiting in line at a Potter midnight preview, Crescent Street resident Peter O’Malley knows that the magic words are not “hocus pocus,” but “hard work.”

O’Malley wasn’t born with a wand in his hand. After getting a masters in education, he started out as a high school Special Ed teacher and group home manager before being bitten by the show biz bug in the late 1970s. He literally taught himself the tricks of the trade in between other performing jobs, including one delivering singing telegrams.

In his heyday he performed aboard cruise ships and at countless hotels and convention centers . He’s done Santa on roller skates. He has conjured at the Kennedy 4th of July gathering and before Sheik Yamani of Saudi Arabia.

Perhaps his closest brush with fame came when he entertained crowds at the old Boston Garden between takes during the filming of “Celtic Pride,” a 1996 movie starring Dan Aykroyd and Damon Wayans.

O’Malley has received his share of kudos over the years. The Herald has called him an “ace magician.” Back in 1992 before Tom Bergeron started handing out those Mirror Ball trophies on “Dancing with the Stars,” he presented O’Malley with “Entertainer of the Year” Award on behalf of the Boston Parents Paper.

But since then, changing tastes and shrinking budgets are making it much harder for one man bands like him to find work. Corporate hospitality engagements have vanished like so many silk scarves. “I used to do 2 to 4 kids’ birthday parties on a weekend,” he notes, “Now I’m lucky if I get one.”

So now he sometimes falls back on his education background to reposition himself as an “edutainer,” appearing throughout the Boston Public School system with his “Say No to Drugs and Alcohol” and “Conservation and Recycling” shows.

For the latter, O’Malley fancifully illustrates the recycling process by ripping up paper and then restoring it and turning a plastic bottle into tape, engaging the kids with sing-along’s and audience participation.

Angelo Giacalone, former principal of Dorchester’s Roger Clap School, once called his presentation there both “entertaining and informative,” “The students left with a deeper understanding of why recycling is important and why it benefits us all.”

For nearly 30 years, O’Malley has been volunteering at Children’s Hospital, doing magic and the Macarena on the patient floors and hosting a weekly live interactive closed-circuit TV show, “Children’s Midday.”

His favorite place to do a little legerdemain is the Emergency Department because “It makes the biggest difference there because kids in the waiting room are so nervous.”

No matter how many CGI spectacles kids have seen, they still can get intrigued by the inexplicable happening right before their eyes. And no matter how tough the economy gets, a true magician will always find ways to keep pulling rabbits out of his top hat.