The Amazing Maisel!

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and meet…
The Amazing Maisel…
The most daring man on earth!

By Brenda Kay Dunagan

The man inside the front-loading washing machine can’t hear the screams of terror from those on the outside. His sore limbs, bound by leg irons and handcuffs, are painfully cramped. Something has gone terribly wrong with his signature and world famous escape stunt. The soapy water chokes him, stinging his eyes and throat, as he spins at 50 rpms. The machine’s deadly spin cycle is about to start, and it will pulverize him, if he doesn’t escape NOW.

Tension builds outside the washing machine as the man inside tries desperately to free himself from his cuffs and leg irons. It’s been way too long., though—it’s never taken this long!—and his anxious assistant awaits the emergency signal from him that she never sees. Through the machine’s small glass window, she sees that blood is starting to tint the sudsy water.

This time, time really is running out!

“Get him out!” the director of a crew filming the escape for a worldwide TV audience screams. “Get him out!”

The assistant reaches to push the large red emergency handle that will shut off the machine.She pushes, but the handle breaks off from the washer—everything is going wrong!—and she screams. This wasn’t in the script!

The emergency crew storms in.

The electricity is cut, and the washing machine’s door is pried open.
The man inside tumbles out ,somersaults out onto a red carpet, leaps to his feet, and with a grin that says he has effortlessly nailed another death-defying escape, victoriously shakes his fists at a shaken film crew.

Albuquerque’s world-record-breaking daredevil is at it again, entertaining millions with his shocking stunts and unassuming boy-next-door grin.

“I just want to sound like a normal guy,” Rick Maisel says, emphatically, peering over the rim of his glasses with huge brown eyes.

Nice try, Rick!

This man is anything but ordinary! Inventor, educator, author, motivational speaker, magician, escape artist…is there anything he can’t do?

“Nothing’s impossible,” Rick chuckles, fidgeting.

“Just don’t try anything I do at home!”

Fans instantly recognize Rick’s Vegas-style red satin sequined jacket and quirky “Ricky Megawatt” rap song, his Weird Al Yankovich humor and mad-scientist mannerisms.

Having logged appearances in 42 countries, Rick has astonished over one billion TV viewers with his myriad of super-human feats. Besides his washing machine act, he conducts over half a million volts of electricity across his skin and through his body, escapes from a strait-jacket while suspended 2,200 feet from a hot-air balloon, and survives being arc-welded into a milk-can, shackled and submerged in 45 gallons of water. Then, there’s the Tank of Death, Rick’s very own macabre invention, a 500-gallon Plexiglas tank filled with water, into which a crane lowers him, upside down in restraints!





Rick boasts an extensive list of television appearances, including The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Today Show, Kathy and Regis Lee, and Maury Povich Show. Ripley’s Believe it or Not! featured him in 225 shows in its live review show in Branson, Mo, as well as its TV series and museums worldwide. The Guiness Book of World Records lists him holding the world record since 1996, escaping upside-down from a straitjacket in 2.23 seconds. And Escape and Beyond, a one-hour television show, features him breaking four world records in escapes that he himself conceived and designed.

Of the thousands of shows in the last forty-two years, his favorites were his childhood performances. The only boy in a family of sisters and female pets, Rick developed a close bond with his father, “Buddy” S.L. Maisel, who died in April 2008.

“Dad wrote my first scripts,” Rick recalls, “He wrote silly one-liner jokes for me that the audiences just loved!”

Buddy encouraged young Rick, and his son joined the International Brotherhood of Magicians (IBM), which, after 35 years of membership, awarded him the Order of the Merlin’s Shield.. Later, Rick joined the Society of American Magicans, and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

“I performed my first professional magic show when I was eight,” Rick grins from ear to ear. Amy, his younger sister, was his assistant.

“Of one hundred contestants, I came in second place with The Illusion of the Appearing Wand, and was awarded $10.. The applause was addictive!”

Sponsored by the IBM at the Silver Spur Family Restaurant, the contest was held for Sorcerers’ Apprentices, a magic club for children ages 8-18. A family friend and life-long IBM member, Stan Jennings, introduced Rick to the brotherhood to which he still belongs.

At 10 years old, Rick had his own professional listing in the Yellow Pages. At 12, he was earning $100 a show at the Petroleum Club in downtown Albuquerque.

His show, billed Ricky Maisel the Amazing, included illusions like the linking handkerchiefs, doll-house production boxes, levitations, dye boxes, appearing goldfish, and the sword box.

The legendary Dai Vernon, considered by many to be the greatest sleight-of-hand magician in the history of magic, gave young Rick this piece of advice:

“Listen, kid, if you do just one trick better than everyone else in the world, or perform an act that no one else has ever performed, you can make it in this business.”

This advice echoed through Rick’s mind throughout his teen years.

“I remembered some video footage of fraternity boys in the 1950s, climbing into dryers with crash helmets. I wanted to perform Harry Houdini’s underwater escapes, but the tank would have cost $25,000. I saw a front-loading washing machine, and thought, This is it!”



He had discovered his niche in the world of magic.

Did he just climb in a washer and start it up?

“No, I had to condition myself,” Rick explains, “with the help of a gastro-endocrinologist doctor, B.W. Brown Laundry Supply, and anti-nausea drugs like Dramamine, I overcame motion sickness before we ever added water.”

Then came the water. And the claustrophobia.

“I never knew that I would be afraid of tight spaces, but when the washer filled with soap and water, I panicked. There just wasn’t much room in there.”

Rick almost drowned the first two times he practiced the escape, but he overcame his claustrophobia.

The washing machine escape catapulted him into world-wide notoriety.
“Houdini, Move Over!” the National Enquirer’s headline proclaimed in 1990 after its reporters had seen Rick’s washing machine escape.

Does he have a death-wish?

“I’m not afraid of dying,” he laughs,” I just don’t want to do it any time soon!”

Rick takes the arts of escape and illusion a step forward, not only hearkening back to vaudevillian stage magic and side-show theatrics, but also employing futuristic, high-tech post-modernism, science fiction, and educational physics in his acts.

Rick’s message to the world is simple:

“I want for people to be exited and curious about the world in which they live. I want for them to challenge illusions and overcome self-limiting fear.”

If anyone knows something about fear, it’s Rick.

He’s overcome fear of heights, tight spaces, and large audiences, just to name a few.. He also has to deal with the risk of injury.

He smashed both wrists in a silver-smithing accident. When his doctor told him to find a new career, Rick found a new doctor instead, and was performing for the National Enquirer the next year.

He’s undergone three spinal surgeries after suffering a broken back from two automobile accidents. He didn’t realize, as he was being lowered by crane over Albuquerque’s Civic Plaza on New Year’s Eve, 2000, that he had a ruptured disk.

His worst injury, however, occurred while filming before a live studio audience for A Current Affair. While being arc-welded inside 50-gallon stainless steel drum, something malfunctioned. After freeing himself from the handcuffs, he couldn’t escape the welds. What happened next, Rick says, was a near-death experience.

“It seemed like the inside of the can was filled with lights. I could see what was happening all around me, even though my eyes were closed. I had been submerged in water for over 90 seconds. I was one second from breathing in the water. Then, the can opened up.”

They re-filmed the scene immediately, even though he nearly drowned.

A venerate performer, Rick shrugged off his near death. “The show must go on!” he now laughs.

“People call me a daredevil. I’m actually a safety expert. I cope with my fear of the unknown by educating myself.”

He makes things look dangerous, although he claims they are very safe.

The only person authorized by the FAA to suspend himself from 30,000 feet by rope restrained in a straitjacket, he has perfected emergency signals, hires trustworthy safety personnel and uses only equipment with which he trusts his life.

His most valuable instruments are his body and his mind. He exercises several hours a day to maintain his flexibility, strength, and cardiovascular stamina. Likewise, he plans every moment of each act with the precision of a mathematician.

What will Rick pull out of his hat next?

Courageous, yet unassuming, Rick has overcome the impossible. Now, he wants to share fearlessness with the mere mortals of the world.

Escape or Die! The Guide to Overcoming Fear, a motivational book, once published, will be available in bookstores around the country. Rick bases it on his personal experiences, his studies in multi-dimensional and quantum physics, and his strong desire to help others live happier, less fearful lives. He will share his invincible genius and charismatic charm with audiences worldwide, combining inspirational talks with death-defying feats, proving once and for all that the human spirit can overcome challenges, limitations, and disabilities, and live in fearless fulfillment!

Brenda Dunagan: Master of the Ballroom!

Albuquerque Dance Instructor Brenda Dunagan Gets Her International Dance Diploma

All of Humankind Cheers

An Awed World Wonders: What's Next For Brenda Dunagan?

Sick of hearing about lying, thieving, sneaky politicians and idiot celebrities? Care to hear about some of the remarkable, talented, smart, hard-working and inspiring people who actually deserve honor and acclaim? Of course you do. I said so.

So here’s Brenda Dunagan. Brenda is a dance instructor, performer, magician, choreographer, scholar, jokester, inspiration and just one incredible human being. She chases dreams and catches them. Read her professional bio here (page 6).

Last week, Brenda got what amounts to her Master’s Degree in ballroom dance instruction: her Licentiate Diploma from the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing. She and Albuquerque dance instructors Bill Zimmerman and Anita McBride went to Los Angeles and took grueling, two-day exams from the snooty Brits who run the Imperial Society. The three, who teach dance at Albuquerque’s Enchantment Ballroom, all passed. They studied and practiced with each other for the exams for more than a year, cheerfully dragging themselves into the studio at 10 o’clock on Saturday mornings--no easy thing for dancers because they're always working into the early morning--to rehearse and meticulously go through each and every step. They also spent untold hours each week studying and memorizing instruction manuals and dance steps. In the week before the exams, Brenda spent more than 30 hours rehearsing.

Brenda is also a tenacious scholar. In December she got her B.S. in biology from the University of New Mexico, with minors in philosophy and chemistry. That came after 11 straight years of going to school part time--never missing a semester--and while working full time as a dancer, instructor and performer. She's performed in all 50 states and 11 countries.

My wife and I have been taking lessons from Brenda for the past year. In that time I’ve gotten to see just how much hard, hard work, dedication and practice—yeah, practice, practice and more practice—it takes to make gliding around a ballroom floor look effortless. And I've gotten to know Brenda. Brenda is a friend, and one of those rare people in life who, because who and what they are, spark you. She has sparked me, and I'm grateful and thrilled for it.

So here's to Brenda, Bill and Anita. Congratulations!


Here's a story I wrote last year about Brenda. It initially appeared in Accent Albuquerque Magazine

By Dennis Domrzalski

“Rock step forward, cha, cha, cha. Rock step backward, cha, cha, cha,” Albuquerque dance instructor Brenda Dunagan encouragingly repeats over and over as she gently coaxes her stiff-jointed, middle-aged student into simple steps and movements that are far beyond his limited ability to comprehend and execute.

The balding student tries, but for someone with the grace and agility of a plodding brontosaurus, it’s a tough and clumsy go. The student manages, with a studied and anguished deliberation, to mechanically place one foot where it’s supposed to go.

It’s not the effortless, fluid and exuberant step that Dunagan would like to see, but it’ll get there. And in a few weeks the student will be gliding across the wooden dance floor of the Enchantment Ballroom dance studio trying desperately to erase the humiliation of a time when he was so painfully shy that the mere thought of dancing made him nervous enough to vomit.

Photo: Steve Bromberg

The student will succeed because Dunagan won’t quit. The 34-year-old dream chaser never has. That’s why, after 11 straight years of taking at least two courses a semester—all while working full-and part-time—Dunagan will graduate in December from the University of New Mexico with a B.S in biology and minors in chemistry and philosophy. That’s why this entrepreneur, stage magician, professional dancer, choreographer, linguist, kick boxer, yoga practitioner, self-starter, movie extra, tutor, model, lover of knowledge, performance artist and passionate individualist will find a new level to climb to after she graduates. She wants to teach, write and continue in academia. Whatever she does, Dunagan will succeed, and in doing so, she’ll inspire others to do the same.

That’s because Brenda Dunagan is contagious. Spend just a little time with this five-foot-three, 115-pound, laugh-loving, category-five human tornado, and you’ll be thinking about goals set and never fully pursued, time wasted in orgies of self-pity and procrastination, and obstacles never sidestepped or smashed to pieces. And in just a little while you’ll be energized and thinking once again about the possible and dusting off those old goals and dreams and saying to yourself, “Dammit, I can do it—No. Dammit. I will do it!”

“People should never give up on what their dream and goal is—if they want to dance or go to college or do anything else that everybody in their life has told them what they couldn’t or shouldn’t do, or aren’t going to able to do. They should disregard that and pursue their dreams,” Dunagan says while using a double-handed clasp to raise a mug of coffee during an interview on a recent day off.

“I’ve had students with one leg learn how to dance. I’ve had people in wheelchairs come up and say, ‘I love music. I love to move. I want to have fun with my wife. Help us choreograph a dance in a wheelchair.’ A lot of people keep from doing things they really have passion for because they say, ‘You know, I’m really not intelligent enough. I’m not young enough. I’m not thin enough, or I’m not physically capable.’

“It is magical and so wonderful to see people overcoming their obstacles and their boundaries and realize that they can catch a dream and celebrate being alive.”

That might seem easy to say for someone who has won countless dance awards, performed in all 50 states and 11 foreign countries, owned her own dance studio and met President George W. Bush, but it comes from experience. Dunagan wasn’t always the beautiful, graceful, high-spirited, funny and charming dancer, artist and determined scholar and philosophy club junkie that she is now. At Manzano High School in the late 1980s she was a skinny nerd whose glasses were almost as big as her head.

“When I was a teenager I didn’t get a lot of dates. I was really awkward and nerdy and I had big, hooter-owl glasses, and I was skinny, skinny,” Dunagan laughs with a confidence that respects a past that tempered the pain of awkwardness with the comfort of isolation.

“On weekends I would stay at home and watch old black and white Hollywood movies—Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire. It was kind of pathetic, but that was my social life. Those were my dates. So I fell in love with old Hollywood—big-band music, women in beautiful, feathery dresses and suave, debonair men in their tuxedos.”

Determined to bust out—and maybe get a date or two—Dunagan nurtured a dream: She would be a singer. She wanted to join Manzano’s Swing Choir. To do so she took some dance lessons at age 17 to make the choir’s dance auditions. It was then that Dunagan realized something about herself: She loved movement and music. It was exciting, and it seemed as if she was born to do it.

“Dancing came very naturally to me,” she says. “When I was 18 I started taking professional ballroom lessons, and started teaching when I was 20. After two years they asked me to teach. It’s funny, because I had never planned on being a dancer.”

During those first few years of teaching dance, Dunagan held onto another goal: She wanted to go to college. No one in her family had ever done so. Her mother and father, Jeanette and Phill Dunagan, ran an appliance business (they still do), and they knew that their daughter would do quite well dancing, performing and jaunting around the world using her talents to transport audiences into fairytale worlds in which they too were gliding effortlessly across ballroom floors with handsome or beautiful partners.

Fate intervened, though. At age 23 Dunagan was in a bad car accident. Ligaments and tendons in her neck were torn. She got a settlement and took three months off to decide what to do with the rest of her life. It was then that her self-starting and self-motivating side really took hold.

“That’s when I taught myself trigonometry,” Dunagan laughs. “I went back and reviewed all the high school crap I had never learned. I was dyslexic and I had always scored horribly in math. I realized that in learning how to dance and learning how to memorize directional movement that I was thinking differently than other people. I bet that I could teach myself math. So I went and got some tutoring books and taught myself algebra, trigonometry and pre-calculus. Then I scored a 98 percent on the college entrance exam. I can write in opposite directions with both hands and I can write with one hand in English and one hand in Spanish (she also knows French) simultaneously.”

Dunagan quit dancing, took a waitressing job and enrolled in college.

“Dancing has always been a means to an end for me. I’d say, ‘Okay, I’ll take this job here and that job there to make enough money to pay my tuition this semester,” she says.

In 1995, after she had quit dancing to fully concentrate on going to college, fate stepped into Dunagan’s life again when she was waitressing at the Great American Land and Cattle Company.

“I was at the restaurant and an old dancing partner of mine was roller skating on rollerblades outside. He broke a wheel on his skate and came in and said, ‘Didn’t you used to dance?’ I said, ‘Yeah, but I don’t dance anymore.’ He said, ‘Oh my god, we’ve got a job at the Kimo Auditorium in two weeks and one of my dancers broke her leg. Can you replace her?’ I said, ‘I quit dancing two years ago and I don’t do that.’”

The former partner persisted and Dunagan began rehearsing with the group. She performed with them at the Kimo.

“There were talent agents in the audience, and the next thing I know I’m getting calls for this show and that show and I’m performing every weekend for the rest of my life,” she says with a “Sometimes, I still can’t believe this” laugh.

In 1999 Dunagan was hired by The Pink Flamingos as a Ginger Rogers impersonator. She toured the country and world with them for two years. Even though she was on the road, Dunagan always made time for school.

“I would always do a correspondence course or fly back and go to school on Tuesday’s, Wednesday’s and Thursday’s and then go back on the road on Friday,” she says.

In 1998 Dunagan became an assistant to Albuquerque magician and escape artist Rick Maisel, the man who, in handcuffs and leg irons, stuffs himself into a front-loading wash machine, turns on the wash cycle and escapes before the deadly spin cycle begins and whirls him into a heap of broken bones. Since then she has bought and sold her own dance studio, helped care for her 92-year-old grandmother, become an on-stage magician, been involved in countless dance and performance productions, including dance and music videos, and donated dozens of dancing lesson packages to various charities. She is studying again with the prestigious Imperial Society of Teachers of Dance of Blackpool, England to get her Licentiate, or Masters teaching certificate (she already has an Associate certificate), in Ballroom Dance. When she gets it, Dunagan will be the only female dance instructor in New Mexico to have one.

Although Dunagan is a fireball and an inspiration, she isn’t flawless.

“I drink copious amounts of coffee,” she says. “That’s my only vice.”

“Only one vice?” the disbelieving interviewer demands.

“I’ll sound like Bill Clinton, here, but define vice,” Dunagan says while laughing.

Dunagan has a favorite saying: “Whatever you do every day is what you will be able to do most of your life. The activities you put off doing are what you lose the ability to do.”

It looks like Brenda Dunagan won’t ever lose the ability to do anything.