Jon Dorenbos is leafing through the photo gallery on his iPhone.
“It’s here somewhere, hang on, let me find this," he said. "You’re not going to believe this. Nobody will believe it. But I don’t really care who believes it. I have two witnesses. Hang on a second. It’s right here.”
It’s the day after Dorenbos, the Eagles’ long snapper and a world-class magician, finished third in the finals on NBC’s America’s Got Talent, and 18 hours after performing in Los Angeles, he’s back in the locker room at the NovaCare Complex recalling what he calls “the greatest experience of my life.”[[393635231, C]]
He’s still looking for that photo as he starts to share a story.
“I was in my apartment right here in Philly getting ready for the finals with my girlfriend and another friend of mine,” he said. “We were sitting at the table and I had the cards out, and I was working on the trick, but it didn’t seem right. Something was missing but I couldn’t figure out what.”
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Dorenbos, the Eagles’ long snapper since the middle of 2006, picked up magic as a teenager following the murder of his mother, Kathy, by his father, Alan, at the family home in Woodinville, Washington.
Magic brought peace and laughter during some very difficult times as a kid, and the biggest reason he loves to perform to this day is to bring peace and laughter to others.
“So we’re sitting there at the table, and just then there was a loud crash behind me,” he said, still flipping through his photo gallery. “I turned around and a photograph had fallen off a shelf onto the floor. It was really weird. What caused it? It’s not like there was a thunderstorm or an earthquake. The building wasn’t shaking. Nobody jostled the shelf. It just fell.”
That’s when Dorenbos finds the photo he’s looking for on his phone. It’s a photo of the photo that had crashed to the floor.
A young boy and a beautiful woman.
“It’s me and my mom,” Dorenbos said.
Dorenbos was 6 when the photo was taken.
“As soon as I saw what photo fell,” he said, “I knew exactly what was missing from my magic trick. I knew exactly what I had to do.”
What was missing was a positive message about what magic means to him and how it helped him through an unimaginably difficult time following his mother’s death.
So Dorenbos didn’t just perform a magic trick Wednesday night. He spoke about what magic means to him.
“Magic saved my life,” he told a national TV audience, “And there have been plenty of times when I was lost, and I didn’t have the answers and I didn’t know where to go. So what I did is I turned to magic and it helped me find myself. It simply taught me don’t hate, don’t blame and to forgive. I’ve learned to forgive, and when that happens, we find ourselves.”
Dorenbos said he doesn’t care what anybody thinks. He knows there was a reason that photograph fell to the floor at the precise moment he was searching for a purpose to his final trick.
“I believe in that sort of thing,” he said. “I believe because I choose to believe. And I believe that photograph fell for a reason.”
