I had the pleasure of attending the new campus center’s inaugural event.  It was the magician Michael Kent’s magic/comedy show on September 7th.  It started off quite exciting; pulsating music and a standard ‘run onstage’ entrance.  Kent took the opportunity to complement our school and simultaneously insult the audience, but all in good humor.  It lightened the mood as he went into his interactive tricks, calling several people up to help him perform.  He stopped quite frequently for short comedy segments and his comedy style reminded me somewhat of Dane Cook.  One person’s phone went off in the audience and he took the opportunity to enclose it within a balloon he blew up.  He promptly removed it, telling the audience member to not be afraid and that the moisture on the cell phone was in fact “magic juice.”

I came to this show skeptical, thinking it would be your standard magic tricks that we’ve all seen before.  Yet, the tricks were original and kept the audience’s attention.  He did things such as cut a rope in half and moving the knot back and forth. One trick that stood out was him somehow producing a card that an audience member picked from a locked box that had been sitting in the audience from the beginning of the show.  However, as he was telling his audience member assistant to check the boxes, she had a look of skepticism.  Of course he readily downplayed and skipped over her raised concern, so it brought me back to reality and the belief that magic is not real!

Towards the end of the show, the audience was alerted that we had a magician among us that actually goes to Stockton.  The crowd urged a magic battle and ‘Magic Dave,’ as he is called walked gladly up to the stage.  Anyone who attended the show would agree that his trick was more than satisfying and left everyone in awe, although it required a subsequent amount of math skills.  Kent referred to him as a “living, breathing, Harry Potter,” and Dave gladly accepted as he took his seat.  Kent closed the show with asking everyone to remember the troops and follow him on Twitter, which makes me realize how dependent advertising is on social networking sites now.  All in all, I was very pleased and entertained with the event and would gladly attend it again if he returned.