Leonora and Gerry Frenette
With her husband’s assistance, Leonora Frenette stepped into a box before being separated into two parts in front of a live audience.
To an untrained eye, it appeared her head moved one way, while her waving hands went another way.
And this seemingly painful, discombobulating illusion was all her idea.
“She had this dream in the middle of the night … to take the top half of her body around the track,” said Gerry Frenette, Leonora’s husband of over 27 years.
She woke up and sketched out her concept, called “Women’s Revolution,” an illusion for the couple’s next magic show. He was immediately on board.
“I thought it was a great idea for something unusual and entertaining,” he said.
Gerry Frenette has been a designer of stage illusions since 1985. But his wife, Leonora, has not only been his stage partner since they were married in the early ’90s, she’s been the architect of many of their inventions.
Their creative partnership has now spanned decades, with the pair performing their elaborate tricks all over the world, including on cruises and at conferences.
The magic of their relationship they display on stage began innocuously enough — through a “companion wanted” ad in the Toronto Star in the fall of 1992.
Such ads ran regularly in the newspaper’s classified section for people looking for a partner, with a phone number included so a reader could get in touch.
That year, Leonora wrote down all the qualities she was looking for in a man. When she came across Gerry’s ad, she’d already interviewed 68 men over the phone and nothing had clicked.
The first line of his ad stuck out to her. In bold lettering, he had written: “Not all men are jerks!”
Women he had dated in the past told him they’d met a lot of men who were substandard at best, so he took that information and decided to start with a tongue-incheek line for the advertisement, he said.
Leonora left him a voicemail, poking fun at his ad, and he was instantly intrigued.
“It sounded like she had good potential,” Gerry said. “But then when I met her, the instant I saw her, I also had a good feeling that she may be the one,” he said.
Their first date was dinner in Mississauga and they talked for hours.
“When I met him, I thought, ‘Oh my god, he’s walked out of my imagination. But does he have the personality to match?’ ” Leonora said. She quickly realized he was also looking for a serious relationship.
“We really, really hit it off. And believe it or not, we were engaged in a few weeks,” she said. They were married less than a year later, in September 1993.
Eventually, the couple slowed down on performing and decided to stick to selling illusions from their website, while Leonora expanded into an art hobby that started to take off, with her husband’s assistance.
Maintaining a romance over many years is no magic trick — ensuring a relationship doesn’t feel stale takes work, she said.
“For me, it’s to keep growing as a person. As long as you keep learning, then you will be an interesting person for your loved one to be interacting with,” she said.
For those dating during the pandemic and exhausted from speaking to others through a screen, she recommends really thinking about our values and if the person you’re talking to fits with that.
“We have a bit of a cultural myth about the ‘one and only,’ when there could be several people you could be happy with if your goals and emotions are in alignment. Once you know yourself and trust yourself, you will know when that person shows up,” she said.
“It will be easy.”