49: Adam Rubin
Source: Reddit
About Adam
Adam Rubin is a best-selling author, magician, improv comedian, lover of funk music, winner of laughing competitions, a fluent speaker of Japanese (after three glasses of sake), and above all, a storyteller on a mission to ensure that the art form stays alive and well for generations to come.
Once upon a time, in a magical land called Hudson Valley, there was a little boy named Adam Rubin, who loved creativity as much as his dad hated the squirrels that feasted on his backyard bird feeders (more on that later). Adam has always embraced the silly and playful in life. He managed to hang on to that irreverence as he grew up, channeling his creativity into a Visual Communications degree from Washington University in St Louis, where he studied advertising.
While at Wash U, Adam fell in love with improv, starting the group Suspicious of Whistlers, which continues to perform to this day. After graduating, Adam moved to Chicago, where he worked at Leo Burnett writing McDonald’s Happy Meal commercials by day and immersed himself in its rich improv comedy scene by night. Audiences were treated to Adam’s storytelling talents and comedic sensibilities at the Annoyance Theater and iO and the creative director may well have ridden off into the proverbial sunset on his proverbial stallion…
But one day, a mutual friend introduced Adam to the man who would become his closest collaborator and with whom Adam would dive headfirst into a career that even his vivid imagination had not contemplated: children’s book author. Their first collaboration, Those Darn Squirrels (inspired by those darn squirrels that his dad was so fond of), would go on to win a Borders Original Voices award and inspire a TDS anthology appreciated by kids and adults alike.
Adam stayed in the ad world until he had multiple books on the bestseller list, at which point he thought to himself… self, I think it’s time we go do this book thing for real for real.
And so he did, writing such classics as Robo-Sauce, Gladys the Magic Chicken, El Chupacabras, and Dragons Love Tacos, a book that I read to a rousing reception from my daughter’s 1st grade class.
This could easily have been the final act in Adam’s journey, but no. Because, magic.
You see, while Adam believes that WRITING is where the magic is, MAGIC was the writing on Adam’s wall long before actual writing was in his life. As a 12-year-old at summer camp, Adam was astonished by his friend’s magic trick involving buttons jumping from hand to hand. Adam being Adam, he could not let it go, leading to sleepless nights spent studying the entirety of Mark Wilson’s Encyclopedia of Magic. This obsession would ignite the flame that, although perhaps dormant during college, came out in force when Adam quit his agency job and found himself with time on his hands. The fan of impossible objects, mechanical puzzles and optical illusions joined the Art of Play, a company started by his two friends that he helped expand into a full-fledged Wonder Emporium that embraces the power of curiosity and gives Adam the opportunity to create objects and puzzles that allow him to share his favorite emotion, astonishment, with curious minds the world over.
And in his capacity as a magician, Adam has worked with legends such as David Blaine, David Copperfield, and others.