CHICAGO STORIES
70 CHICAGO | SEPTEMBER 2019
been a deck of playing cards or a ten-
nis ball, she’s no longer certain — placed
inside a glass bottle. She can still taste the
feeling of wonderment, like she was gaz-
ing at an M.C. Escher staircase in real life.
The godfather of the impossible bottle
was an elementary school teacher in San
Diego named Harry Eng. Most people
have seen model ships inside a bottle,
and most know the painstaking method
for assembling them. The contents of
Eng’s bottles, though, defied explana-
tion: padlocks, baseballs, light bulbs, a
knotted nautical rope tied to a deck of
playing cards impaled by a steel bolt. Eng
never revealed how he accomplished his
magic, taking his secrets to the grave.
An obituary in the October 1996 issue
of Genii ma g a zine sa id of Eng : “Ha r r y put
things in bottles to challenge himself
and to make people think.”
Those seeking to emulate Eng
essentially have to reverse-engineer
his creations. “There’s no instruction
manual,” says Gabe Fajuri, a magic his-
torian and president of Potter & Potter,
a Chicago auction house specializing in
antique magic collectibles. “The few peo-
ple I know who make these things, they
keep it to themselves.” When asked how
many people in the world can produce
an impossible bottle, Fajuri estimated
half a dozen.
The impetus for Andrews’s impos-
sible bottles arose not from objects but
from scent. One of the tricks she’d been
working on involved handing someone
an empty perfume bottle, filling it with
water, and having a second audience
member think of a random scent — say,
cedarwood. When the spectator sprayed
the atomizer — voilà! — cedarwood. The
idea of incorporating impossible bottles
into her show intrigued her.
There are instructional videos on
YouTube showing people bending and
unbending playing cards to fit them
inside a bottle, or using long tweezers to
reassemble a broken-apart Rubik’s Cube.
But such clips would have proved useless
for the first impossible bottle objects
Andrews had in mind, which included,
among other things, a potted flower.
A breakthrough came in June 2018
while she was in New York City visit-
ing the Conjuring Arts Research Center,
a library of historical magic texts that
requires visitors to obtain approval
from the center’s board before they can
even ma ke a n appoint ment. Wit h just 10
minutes remaining of Andrews’s allotted
time, a librarian called her over: Buried
inside an obscure mathematics journal
was a four-sentence passage from an
interview with Harry Eng, in which he
alluded to one of his methods. It wasn’t
the method Andrews would need, but it
was a trigger that sent her in the direc-
tion she needed to go.
She began learning everything she
could about bottles — the history of glass
production, the classification of screw
caps, differences in turn radius. Andrews
would frequent the thrift store near her
home several times a week, picking up
any bottles donated that day.
Her first forays hit dead ends. A prom-
ising lead would prove infeasible, as
would the next, and so it went for nearly
a month. “In some ways I am my work,
and my work is me,” Andrews says. “So
any failure within my work is totally
inseparable from who I am as a person.”
Then, while walking through her local
arts and crafts store, Andrews had a flash
of inspiration. Again, it was not the exact
method she needed, but another nudge
forward. After weeks of frustration — “a
lot of tears and a lot of stress” — the
moment felt like a small victory.
Soon every free surface in Andrews’s
studio apartment was occupied by bot-
tles, around 300 by her estimate. By
this point, even her best friend and her
father were not allowed to visit. She’d
open the door only for her mother,
Caryn, who became a sounding board, a
beacon of encouragement. “I would keep
reminding her that she overcame things
in the past,” Caryn says. “I kept saying,
‘You’ll get it.’ ”
By August, Andrews was able to
fit a red Lego brick inside a miniature
glass vase. And yet it took her another
five months — by now it was the middle
of winter, almost a year after she’d firstembarked on the creation of impossible
bottles — just to figure out the objects
she wanted to enclose in the bottles to
be used in her show: a sealed deck of
playing cards, a wooden chess rook, a
compact mirror, and the potted flower,
which she decided would be a single
white rose.
During one grueling stretch, she
didn’t leave her house for two days.
Friends suggested she go out more,
enjoy life, meet new people, be a nor-
mal 20-something living in the city. She
shrugged them off. “I could be getting a
lot done in this time, doing the things I’d
rather be doing,” she recalls thinking.
It w a s n’t u nt i l t h i s M a r c h t h a t A n d r e w s
finally got the objects into their bottles.
Her achievement did not involve a eureka
moment when t he object dropped inside
and clinked to the bottom, but rather
was the result of months of slow, ardu-
ous trial and error. Beyond that, she will
reveal only that neither glass nor object
was cut and that 3D printing was in no
way involved. The basic idea could be
explained in three words, she says, but
the process “is so complicated and so
labor-intensive, people would think, ‘Oh
my God, this is insane.’ ”
The bottles are currently being used
in a magic show she wrote called Bottling
the Impossible, which Andrews debuted
in June at Ma na Contempora r y C h ica go,
an arts center and performance space in
Pilsen. (The show will be performed at
the Elmhurst Art Museum on October
17.) This was where I first encountered
the bottle housing the compact mirror.
She brandished it like a magic wand
before launching into a trick in which
she names a number and a playing card
that a random audience member had
been thinking of.
Watching Andrews use the bottled
mirror to introduce her mind-reading
trick, I couldn’t help but think of her
painstaking endeavor as some kind of
metaphor. Perhaps it was this: For over
a year, Andrews had struggled to think
her way into a bottle, and now she could
look inside, see her own reflection, and
know that she’d succeeded. C