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Megan and I went to a wonderful magic show last night, Kevin Blake, The Illusionist at the Palace Theater.

It was a very enjoyable evening with my wife. Oh and dinner beforehand at a restaurant down the street… “606” I think it was called, was a real treat!

Particularly memorable parts of the show include the first moments of the show when he threw a paper airplane and after a few feet, it just hovered in the air impossibly!

He talked eloquently about neuroliguistic programming and the debunked “magic” behind it and then proceeded to magically force people to take numbers and sit where he wanted them to in order to manifest a perfect arrangement of people, numbers, and chairs.

Dice rolling: He rolled dice down a clear acrylic dice rolling tower and audience members got to call out what number they would roll. His showmanship was excellent and the whole room cheered on as each die came up with the roll that was called out!

Mentalism: when we walked in at the beginning of the evening, we found envelopes on our chairs, asking us to write down a personal question, and then answer it. Just before intermission, Kevin asked us to put the envelopes into a box on the stage. The box sat there under a spotlight during intermission. After intermission, he came out, and did the impossible!

First, he talked about and showed that he didn’t have some insanely sophisticated technology to watch and listen to people during intermission, and he didn’t have an earpiece. And then he began…

He picked up the first envelope without opening it and read off the initials on it. He set the envelope down and started addressing the person with slowly increasing certainty… sounding out their name, details about the question and answer. He nailed it. For the next person, he didn’t pick up an envelope, he just called out some initials and started in. For the next, he pointed to the person in the audience as he said the next initials, gave details about the person, what zodiac sign they were, brought up the question and the answer in what was a beautifully creepy mentalism! Most astoundingly, he talked about more than 50 people as if he KNEW them and all of their secrets. But how!?! At a minimum, he needed to MEMORIZE ALL THAT INFORMATION after IMPOSSIBLY extricating it from the cards that we put in the envelopes! Or, the most obvious answer would be that he just knew everything… EVERYTHING! It was awesome!

Multiplication Board: after he was done with the envelopes, he rolled a board out. He had asked people to fill in the board during intermission, each of the 24 cells were to be filled in by a patron with a 2 digit number and their initials. He looked over the board for a few moments and then did the impossible! He turned to the audience and did things like reciting ALL of the numbers, all of the 10’s place numbers, adding up all the numbers of a row, adding up ALL of the numbers. Then, still without looking at the board, he rattled off all the initials!! Had people stand up and then sit down as he recited their initials! It was insane! He did everything with such speed and precision, there is no way he was listening to a secret prompter. He must have memorized the entire board and done all the math! He must have!

Cards: A fun, elaborate card trick where he dealt cards and gave one person a royal flush, and yet he ended up with a higher hand!