It seems, well, deceptive to call The Quantum Eye a magic act, and I don't think that Sam Eaton - the mild-mannered mentalist who performs the show - would want to be called a magician. (It's perhaps also deceptive to say that it's a one-man show, since every bit of business requires at least one audience volunteer.) Despite some parlor tricks of the playing card variety, the "supernormal" evening is not so much a flashy sleight-of-hand entertainment. It's more a low-key (but sometimes wildly impressive) presentation of mind-teasing deceptions performed at close-range. Eaton's are not filament wire, secret compartment types of tricks. He says that the deceptions he performs in the intimate, ninety minute show can be figured out with common sense and he encourages us to use ours. For exactly that reason I can't get The Quantam Eye fully out of my head. I think I have a good idea how he was able to guess what a volunteer wrote on an index card sealed in an envelope, but most else baffled me. How was he able to get a volunteer to close her eyes and blindly spin the dial on her wristwatch and have it read the exact time that another volunteer secretly wrote down on paper?
Saturday, October 13, 2007
The Quantum Eye
It seems, well, deceptive to call The Quantum Eye a magic act, and I don't think that Sam Eaton - the mild-mannered mentalist who performs the show - would want to be called a magician. (It's perhaps also deceptive to say that it's a one-man show, since every bit of business requires at least one audience volunteer.) Despite some parlor tricks of the playing card variety, the "supernormal" evening is not so much a flashy sleight-of-hand entertainment. It's more a low-key (but sometimes wildly impressive) presentation of mind-teasing deceptions performed at close-range. Eaton's are not filament wire, secret compartment types of tricks. He says that the deceptions he performs in the intimate, ninety minute show can be figured out with common sense and he encourages us to use ours. For exactly that reason I can't get The Quantam Eye fully out of my head. I think I have a good idea how he was able to guess what a volunteer wrote on an index card sealed in an envelope, but most else baffled me. How was he able to get a volunteer to close her eyes and blindly spin the dial on her wristwatch and have it read the exact time that another volunteer secretly wrote down on paper?
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You're a better man than I for liking the act... or maybe he actually guessed CORRECTLY when you went. He got far too much wrong the evening I was there, and he didn't have the personality to shrug it off. Also, I'm fairly sure I can do his mnemonic trick (which I think has nothing to do with mnemonics).
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