If you are a magician fan, then the Marcus Public Library was the place to be on Thursday (June 29) at 2 o’clock p.m. Jonathan May was there to entertain an audience of fans of magic!
Jonathan is a professional magician that does over 400 shows a year for an audience of all ages. At the Library, this is what his audience was—many kids and adults as well. All had come to see if “what they saw, really was what they saw”!
Jonathan was wearing a short sleeved shirt and red shoes to match the red trim on the shirt. I was wondering how he was going to make something disappear if he didn’t have long sleeves for the disappearing act—at least that is where I thought most disappearing things went!
He had three bags on the front table and one was a shiny red one. Music was coming from another corner. Would people pay some attention to the music as he was performing a magical act and not see where something disappeared?
He had a volunteer boy come and handed him yellow balls—one in each hand. Through several touching of these balls, they either disappeared and ended up in Jonathan’s shirt pocket or else there were more than two balls in the boy’s hands. How was this happening? The boy couldn’t figure out what was happening and that is what magic is all about—not really knowing what happened!
No magic act is complete unless there is a rope involved. He had a long rope that mysteriously became two ropes and then even more. He didn’t cut the rope to make more so how did the long rope become several ropes when all he did was continuing tying the rope up? The end of the rope act saw the several ropes now becoming one long rope again.
There were several kids sitting on pillows on the floor. Jonathan got right down to their level to talk to them several times. This is what the kids liked about this magician. Standing up he produced a yellow scarf that he twirled around several times. He rolled it up and put it in his one hand and closed the hand to make a fist. The next time he opened his fist up, out came a blue scarf! He asked the kids where the yellow scarf was and of course, some of them told him they knew where it was but they were wrong! Twirling the blue scarf around and putting it in his fist, now the yellow scarf appeared after opening his fist.
He had a coin with blue on one side and red on the other side. After several times of moving the coin around, one color would disappear and later on would show up again. How did he do this? Only he knew!
He went to one of his containers and pulled out some packets. Now he had a girl and a boy come forward. Out of the packet, he had a poster that declared that there would be a boy as a volunteer and the boy would have a blue shirt on and the same was for the girl that had volunteered. How did the posters know that these two would be part of the act?
One of his other confusing acts was when a girl and a boy volunteered to be in the dollar bill act. While the girl was given $11 and she went to the boy and counted out the bills but there were only $10. Where was the other one? Then the boy counted back the dollars and found there were only $9. What was going on? The kids were as confused as to where the extra dollars were constantly missing as were others in the audience. We never did figure out how this was done. The two volunteers were given a much larger, fake $1 bill for helping him. (As they were leaving the Library, they asked him to autograph their bill!)
These aforementioned acts were but a few of what he offered in his magic performance. How did these things happen when we thought we were really paying attention to what he was doing? Slight of hand, as well as other distractions (maybe the music?) This is what “magic” is all about!