NEW ORLEANS -- Voodoo dolls, spell kits, gris-gris bags -- this is what most folks recognize as New Orleans-style magic. But that was before Harry the Hat set up shop in the French Quarter with a very different bag of tricks.

At Sideshow, the corner magic store at the western end of Chartres (pronounced "charter") Street, Harry -- that would be Harry Anderson (Harry the Hat from Cheers, Night Court's Judge Harry T. Stone, and Dave Barry of Dave's World) -- can be found holding court with his charming wife, Elizabeth.

Anderson assails tourists and locals alike with freak-show oddities and, if you're lucky, some of his spectacular sleight-of-hand skills.

Photo courtesy Ellen Kotzin. You can also visit her fan site at www.harryandersonfan.com

Sideshow is Anderson's second shop -- the first being the Spade and Archer (named for Sam Spade's detective agency in The Maltese Falcon) -- a by-appointment-only magic museum. Located kitty corner to his new enterprise, but currently being used as a storage and manufacturing space, it boasts guillotines, an electric chair -- and the actual Maltese falcon.

"When we shot the pilot for Night Court, I decorated the judge's office with things from my home," the engaging Anderson says in the back office at Sideshow. "I owned a plaster-of-Paris replica of the falcon that I bought in a mystery book shop. After the pilot, the prop man, who was an older fellow at Warner Brothers, asked me if they could keep the items, hold on to them in case the show got picked up. I said I didn't really want to part with [the falcon], that it was sentimental to me. He suggested that there was another one, a black bird very much like it in storage -- this is Warner Brothers, who made the film The Maltese Falcon," he says, eyes twinkling, "and if it would be all right with me if he exchanged, if they kept the plaster-of-Paris one and gave me the one that was in their old storage vault.

"Years later I brought it on The Tonight Show. I told him [Johnny Carson] this story and he doubted it, because," he says boyishly, "I tend to fabricate stories.

Photo courtesy Ellen Kotzin. You can also visit her fan site at www.harryandersonfan.com

"The next night, he announced that he'd gotten a call from a retired props fellow at Warner Brothers who said, yes, in fact he did inadvertently give Harry Anderson the Maltese falcon," Anderson says. "There were three for the film. I have one. It's the only one, as far as I'm concerned."

So while the falcon preens on a shelf across the road, at Sideshow two-headed ducks under bell jars keep company with whoopie cushions and Barbie Doll-sized figures modelled after the Twilight Zone episode The Eye of the Beholder (in which pig-faced doctors fail to transform a female patient's face into their own image of beauty).

Here you can find any trick in the book, and everything is for sale. "I hate the NFS [not for sale] signs in a shop," Anderson says of places where the best is only for show.

Admitting that some of Sideshow's merchandise may seem expensive, he says, wryly, that "if you want a really nice flying squirrel, you have to pay for it."

Photo courtesy Ellen Kotzin. You can also visit her fan site at www.harryandersonfan.com

However, he's quick to add, "We have 79-cent items for kids in the magic section. We try to set [the store] up like a sideshow. You've got your games, chance, oddities, your magic, wild animals. We've got your 'cooch,' you know, your naked girls, the kinds of things you see at the midway -- all very modest by New Orleans standards."

But most of all they have cards: from mystical recipe cards to Anderson's own fanning sets to glow-in-the-dark tarot decks.

Initially, he considered opening just a shop of cards. And no wonder. Anderson, who still performs his prestidigitation for corporate crowds, learned the craft at the age of 7 at the elbows of "old guys with hand-painted ties, fedoras and sleeve garters" in Chicago's Ambassador Hotel (now the Omni) where his dad, a salesman, would drop young Harry off downstairs with the hotel's lunching card players. It was here he learned the Yiddish game of clobyosh, which he played years later with George Burns while shooting a special at Disneyland.

Photo courtesy Ellen Kotzin. You can also visit her fan site at www.harryandersonfan.com

"I've played cards with people who don't share a language, but we can play cards. It was out of admiration for them that I decided to become a magician. I think that's where Harry the Hat came from."

In some ways, Harry the Hat has come full circle. Having honed his tricks in the French Quarter's Jackson Square during the 1970s, Anderson has opted for self-exile from Los Angeles. "It wasn't just a matter of coming to New Orleans -- it was also a matter of leaving [Los Angeles]. So there is a feeling of exile, of not being in the United Sates in the traditional sense.

In New Orleans, "what's been constant here is the acceptance, the way this place accepts you however you come in. There's something about the tropical nature of it, the age of it, the fact that the termites are winning, the decay. You relax. You don't have to worry about making sure that everything lasts 200 years because it's not going to. I figure it will be around till I'm done."

Sideshow: 901 Chartres St., New Orleans; phone: (504) 581-2012.

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