The Great Escape

With his big plans waylaid by the pandemic, Spencer Horsman continues to entertain.

- Eddie Matz

For once, Spencer Horsman cannot escape. It doesn’t matter how much oxygen he stores in his lungs. It doesn’t matter how many keys he tries. Even the tiny one that dangles from the black lanyard hanging around his neck—a bittersweet souvenir from the childhood home he just sold— won’t free him. Not from these shackles.

It’s just after 6 p.m. on an overcast Friday in August, and Horsman has been holding his breath for 3,688 hours, four minutes, and 17 seconds. That’s how long it’s been since COVID first shut down Illusions Magic Bar in Federal Hill back in mid-March, preventing its owner/head liner from playing to a packed house every Friday and Saturday night, and from riding the tidal wave of momentum he’d gained as a result of his spectacular January appearance on America’s Got Talent: The Champions. That’s how long he’s been waiting for life as he knows it to resume.

In the meantime, just like the other seven billion people on the planet, he continues to fake it ’til he makes it.

“I’m flexible like Gumby,” says Horsman, repeating the words of his late father. A professional clown who joined Ringling Brothers straight out of high school and then spent two decades crisscrossing the Mid-Atlantic in a Ronald McDonald costume, Ken Horsman died of cancer in 2016 at the age of 58, but not before leaving his son a lasting legacy.