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Please allow me to reintroduce myself…

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Please allow me to reintroduce myself…
« on: February 08, 2017, 08:00:15 AM »
 

Don Boyer

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Hello, everyone!

For those of you who don't know me, my name is Don Boyer. I am the administrator of this forum and one of the board members of 52 Plus Joker.  I've been collecting playing cards since December 2010 and currently have approximately 1,800 decks in about 800 different varieties, standard and custom, modern and vintage, "straight" and gaffed.  In addition to collecting playing cards, I also perform card magic, mostly as a volunteer at a hospital in Brooklyn, New York.  Lastly, I also do consulting work for playing card designers, helping them to refine their designs and make them more functional as well as offering marketing tips.

I've been absent quite a bit of late and I thought I would drop in and offer an explanation as to why. In the past few months, my life has become exceptionally hectic. It is rapidly approaching its peak, however. In the coming week, I will be moving to a new, larger apartment a few blocks away from where I presently live in Westchester County, New York and tomorrow, my girlfriend, who became my fiancée last month, will become my third wife!  It's a very sudden change for the both of us – we had not intended on getting married so quickly but possible changes in healthcare legislation in the United States have forced our hand to some extent.

In fact, the reason that precipitated the timing of our marriage is also going to be the topic of an interview that my future wife and I will be having just prior to our wedding with a local NPR news reporter, who will also be there to record our wedding ceremony as part of the article he's creating.  Assuming the article does indeed make the final cut and get aired on our local NPR station, WNYC-AM/FM, I'll be keeping an eye out for it and will provide a link so that you can learn more about it for yourself if you're interested.

There's still more hecticness to come, unfortunately. Next month, my wife will be moving into the new apartment from her place – and she has about twice as many belongings as I do, which is going to make arrangements a little tricky!  By April, she will be flying out to Las Vegas to help her mother move into an assisted living facility while I'll be flying out to the San Francisco Bay area with an old friend of mine to celebrate our 50th birthdays together (mine isn't until August while his is in the spring). Once we've completed settling into the new apartment, we plan on holding a second, more formal wedding ceremony which will also serve as our housewarming party – that's the event to which we plan to invite all of our friends and family.  When the dust finally settles from that, I do plan to be here more frequently. Until then, I hope you'll forgive me if I'm only popping in on an occasional basis rather than regularly.

Cheers,
Don
Card Illusionist, NYC Area
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Re: Please allow me to reintroduce myself…
« Reply #1 on: February 08, 2017, 12:24:48 PM »
 

Eddie Hughlett

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Was wondering where you had been. Thanks for the update. Congratulations on all that is good.
"...almost every ruse in the game is more or less dependent upon another one."

 - S.W. Erdnase
 

Re: Please allow me to reintroduce myself…
« Reply #2 on: February 08, 2017, 03:54:20 PM »
 

Card Player

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Hey Don

Something told me to stop by and see what was new. Its been awhile. Just so happened to check your posts and saw this one posted today. What are the odds. Congratulations to you and your future wife.

All my best!

 

Re: Please allow me to reintroduce myself…
« Reply #3 on: March 01, 2017, 01:41:15 AM »
 

Don Boyer

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Hey, here's that radio interview I mentioned.

http://www.wnyc.org/story/sickness-and-health-insurance/

I don't know if it was picked up nationally on NPR or not, but it was on the local station.  One of my co-workers heard it in his car on the way to work!
Card Illusionist, NYC Area
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Deck Tailoring: Custom Alterations for Magicians and Card Mechanics
Services for Hire - http://thedecktailor.com/
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Re: Please allow me to reintroduce myself…
« Reply #4 on: March 06, 2017, 09:09:59 PM »
 

leangyan

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Glad to know you're back here, Don. Congratulations to you & your future wife!!!
 

Re: Please allow me to reintroduce myself…
« Reply #5 on: March 07, 2017, 02:09:02 AM »
 

Cardfool

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Congrats Don!  Glad to have you back!
 

Re: Please allow me to reintroduce myself…
« Reply #6 on: March 07, 2017, 02:25:47 AM »
 

Don Boyer

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Glad to know you're back here, Don. Congratulations to you & your future wife!!!

You mean my current wife!  That radio interview I linked to was recorded at our wedding ceremony - you can even hear us exchanging our vows in the recording.  It took place Thursday, February 9th, on the day of a rather nasty snowstorm that dumped several inches of snow on the entire New York metro area.  We were lucky to get married at all - state law requires two witnesses and my guests canceled due to the weather.  My witnesses ended up being the radio reporter and my landlord, who lived in the apartment below me at the time (I've since moved to a larger place to accommodate the new wife and her belongings).

Congrats Don!  Glad to have you back!

Nice to be back.  I'm still busy up to my eyeballs, but trying to keep a toe wet in this little pond.
Card Illusionist, NYC Area
Playing Card Design & Development Consultant
Deck Tailoring: Custom Alterations for Magicians and Card Mechanics
Services for Hire - http://thedecktailor.com/
Pre-Made Decks for Sale - http://donboyermagic.com/
 

Re: Please allow me to reintroduce myself…
« Reply #7 on: March 07, 2017, 05:07:54 PM »
 

Kruser

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Guess I'm late to the party ... Congratulations! - Matching china is in the mail!  ;)

As a Canadian, I found the interview very interesting!

I now also realize I've been mispronouncing 'Boyer' in my head all this time!   :-\

Welcome Back!

Kruser
"The mind is like a parachute - It works best when it's open." - Frank Zappa
 

Re: Please allow me to reintroduce myself…
« Reply #8 on: March 08, 2017, 03:28:56 AM »
 

Don Boyer

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Guess I'm late to the party ... Congratulations! - Matching china is in the mail!  ;)

As a Canadian, I found the interview very interesting!

I now also realize I've been mispronouncing 'Boyer' in my head all this time!   :-\

Welcome Back!

Kruser

As a Canadian by heritage, I know what you mean.  My mother is Québécoise and a naturalized American citizen, while I also still have relatives in the province as well as some who moved to America but retained their citizenship, opting instead to become resident aliens.  Our beloved club president and my friend, Lee Asher, is an American by birth and a Torontonian by residence as well as a Canadian resident alien.

Regarding the last name, most people in North America pronounce it the Anglicized way but it is French in origin, so I use the French pronunciation.  My father's father's father was a Frenchman who did some traveling - he emigrated to Ireland, met and married a native citizen there, then continued through Canada and eventually arrived in the US, settling in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York.

I'm actually the only one of my siblings that uses the French pronunciation - I adopted it when I started learning Japanese in college in my late twenties!  The French sound of the name translates better into Japanese than the English one does.  When I moved on to practicing a Japanese martial art, I took to labeling my uniform and practice weapons with my name in Japanese using the French pronunciation, printed in the katakana syllabary (katakana is used in Japanese for onomatopoeia [printed versions of sound effects], some loan words from foreign languages that lack a Japanese equivalent and foreign names and proper nouns).  I even had introduction cards printed with my name in "French Japanese" for handing out to fellow martial artists at seminars and when visiting other schools.  I liked the pronunciation so I've kept it all this time.

My mother's family, being native French speakers from birth, always used that pronunciation, so it sounds natural to my ear.  I never learned French as a child because my parents divorced when I was five - my father forbade my mother from teaching my brothers and me French because he couldn't speak it, didn't want to learn it and didn't want us to be able to carry on conversations he couldn't understand.

There's a certain irony in the fact that my father was mistaken for a famous French celebrity once.  He married in the early 1960s and shared the same name as the actor Charles Boyer, who was still a well-known name in the French-speaking part of the world at the time, as well as to a lesser extent in the English-speaking part.  My parents honeymooned in Niagara Falls on the Canadian side of the border - to this day, the American side is still largely undeveloped parkland while the Canadian side has long had nice hotels and entertainment, even before the two casinos there opened in the 1990s and 2000s.  Not long after checking in, my dad got a phone call in French from a local radio station - he put my mother on to speak to them.  It turns out that when he checked in, someone noticed the famous name in the register and tipped them off, prompting a phone call from the hotel desk to the radio station, which I'm sure was especially interested seeing that the "actor" checked in as a honeymooner with someone other than his known wife!

Interesting side notes about the real actor - he married a British actress in 1934, became a naturalized American in 1942, had a son in '43, lost his son to suicide in '65, lost his wife to cancer in '78 and took his own life two days later, which was also two days before his 79th birthday.  He was still active in movies, having filmed his last role in A Matter of Time,, released two year earlier.  But kids today probably know him more for an animated character that was modeled after one of his film roles, the one that launched his career.  In 1938, his breakthrough role was in a film called Algiers, in which he played Pepe le Moko, a desert-dwelling thief opposite Hedy Lamarr - a famous mis-quote of the character is "Come with me to the Casbah!," which became a popular line of the Chuck Jones character Pepé Le Pew, who in turn was based on Boyer's character.  Boyer also earned the nickname "the last of the cinema's great lovers," for continuing to have a successful film career well into his twilight years, longer than most romantic lead actors of his heyday.

(Wow, one little comment and I write a novel about it...)
« Last Edit: March 08, 2017, 03:29:33 AM by Don Boyer »
Card Illusionist, NYC Area
Playing Card Design & Development Consultant
Deck Tailoring: Custom Alterations for Magicians and Card Mechanics
Services for Hire - http://thedecktailor.com/
Pre-Made Decks for Sale - http://donboyermagic.com/