Stacey Suarez never set out to be a magician’s assistant. It just kind of happened that way.

The human brain is a 3-pound lump of fat and blood vessels that contains all of a person’s hopes, dreams, fears, obsessive thoughts and the location of my keys. It’s a miracle of natural engineering. I’m in awe of its complexity and of the fact that electrical impulses and neurotransmitters account for the sum of my experience. Way to go, brain.

I was a teenage tagger. My high school was administered by lapdogs of the dark prince. The only logical way to deal with them was to grab a fat-tipped marker and write a three-, four- or five-letter moniker, probably with the word "one" tacked on to the end (BEARONE, for example). The adults hated graffiti more than anything.