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Being a rational person, magic has always fascinated me because I always tend to want an explanation to everything that I don't understand but care about. The more magic shows I see, the more I am amazed by the magician's skills.
Today I went to a show called Monday Night Magic. It is the longest running off-broadway magic show in New York City. Tonight's line up of the magicians included Torkova, Rocco, and the featured magician Jon Stetson with whom I am pictured on the left. The show was hosted by Jamy Ian Swiss who also did couple of tricks as part of his introduction to the show. Torkova and Rocco were part of the first half of the show. All of their tricks were illusion based. Various objects appeard in their hands out of nowhere, they multiplied and transported from one hand to another. While watching Rocco I realized that most of his tricks are based on the stuff that he put in the sleeves of his jacket. I actually could see him slipping stuff in there and taking it out. Several times during his act I could already tell that a new object would appear in his hands before it actually did. Most of the props that Rocco used were cigarets and bottles of alcohol - the objects that suited his look.
Then there was a 15 minute intermisssion during which the spectators could see some closeup magic tricks by some other magicians that were scattered in various places in the theater. People gathered around the magicians and could see the tricks literally in front of their eyes.
The second part of the show consisted of Jon Stetson. His magic was not illusion based. Instead it was based on mind tricks. Basically he was able to guess what people where thinking. For example, he asked a random person from the audience to think of her first boyfriend and then he was able to guess his name. He did have one cool illusion trick where he borrowed rings from random members of the audience and was able to link them together inside of the palms of a volunteer on the stage. Jon was very entertaining. His numerous jokes seemlessly integrated with the audience responses to his acts. Many of his tricks were similar to the ones I saw at Chamber Magic show at the Waldorf Astoria.
I highly recommend Monday Night Magic to anyone. They have a show every Monday and each day they have different magicians. It's very likely that I will come back several times!
