Many believe that magic tricks are just illusions. After Saturday night’s performance by America’s Got Talent’s magician Jay Mattioli, however, the line between magic and illusions seemed to blur. At age 18, Mattioli, a New York born, received the “Champion of Magic” award from the International Brotherhood of Magicians. He started the show with a pigeon trick in which he made a pigeon appear out of nowhere. He repeated this trick twice, producing three pigeons that he put in a glass case. Later he made them disappear. Natalee Marcotte ’11 was the victim of his next trick. Mattioli removed her watch and placed it in a napkin. When Mattioli smacked the napkin with the watch against the table, Marcotte thought that he had broken her watch. But she did not realize that the watch was no longer in the napkin, but actually with another audience member a few rows down. Drama and suspense peaked in Mattioli’s act when he took on a dangerous needle trick. Mattioli asked for a volunteer to take a needle and poke it through his eye. Spectators gasped and yelled reprimands at Mattioli. “Don’t do that!” yelled a horrified audience member. Hesistantly, the volunteer lifted his hand, and Mattioli jerked back laughing at the preposterousness of his trick, revealing that this was not the actual trick. The real trick began when he swallowed several needles and a long thread. Unbelievably, he regurgitated the needles, this time perfectly threaded. In a much simpler trick, Mattioli selected an audience member for what seemed to be the traditional ‘pick a card’ trick. However, instead of saying what the card was, Mattioli illustrated it on a large notebook for the audience to see. At first, he sketched the wrong card, but as he waved his hand over the picture, the image of the correct card emerged from behind the other card. The audience screamed at the shear impossibility yet reality of the trick. Spectators commented, “I know how to do that trick,” and “He’s using wires for that,” but this trick just seemed too simple to be a hoax. “You can’t look at it like Mattioli’s defying nature by performing his tricks but instead he is defying your perception of nature,” said Heather Menar ’12. Mattioli ended his performance with a trick that has withstood the test of time: human levitation. He called upon a volunteer, Walter Chacon ’13, and asked him to lie down on a table. Suddenly, both Chacon and the tabletop floated in the air. To prove that nothing held Chacon suspended in the air, Mattioli dragged a hula-hoop around Chacon’s body. Before leaving the stage, Mattioli talked about all the support he had received from his grandmother throughout his childhood and how she used to buy him tricks from Tannen’s Magic in New York every year for Christmas. His testimony left the audience not just mystified but also touched.
