Bwog Staffers Lily Pazner, Lily Mooney, and Hannah Keyes attended an event in IRCPL’s “On Wonder” series, where magician Jeanette Andrews revealed all of her not-so-magical secrets.

Who knew magic and science had so much in common? Certainly not us! 

Last Wednesday, February 8, Columbia’s Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life hosted an event called “On Wonder: An Evening of Magic with Jeanette Andrews.” The event began with a series of “magic” tricks performed by Andrews, interspersed with arguably over-detailed explanations of the mechanics, and was followed by a Q & A with Professor Matthew Engelke as well as audience members. 

Upon our entrance into Earl Hall, we were handed little black cards with two symbols on either side. We were excited, intrigued even. While we held onto these cards, the magic began. Jeanette Andrews introduced herself, a practicing parlor magician since the age of four (we are all way behind on our professional magician journeys). Additionally, she is an Affiliate of the metaLab at Harvard University and artist-in-residence at the Institute of Art and Olfaction.

She went on to explain, in typical magician fashion, that she was going to make one of the symbols on the cards disappear. Walking us through an activity in which we held the card away from our faces, closed one eye, and did a bunch of other maneuvers that we struggled to complete, the symbol did eventually disappear! With no time to bask in the glory of having participated in magic, Andrews shattered the illusion: she had just directed us to put the card in front of our optic blindspot. This was no miracle, she assured us, it was just science. 

After this demystifying moment, she went on to have members of the audience perform the next trick. As a creepy and unsettling audio narrated the steps, audience members were arranged magically to be in the seat with a matching phrase that they were given. This trick unfortunately was not given an explanation and left us questioning our own free will.

As the magic portion of the night concluded, Andrews left us with one final trick that is quite literally her specialty. Andrews explained that she has copyrighted this trick, one of the few copyrighted pieces of magic in the world. Andrews plucked a petal off of one of the white roses from the table in front of her, placed it in a glass cup, swirled it around, and magically, it transformed from a petal into an egg, which Andrews showcased by cracking the egg into her hand. Someone get Jeanette Andrews on the 2023 egg shortage stat!

Finally, we would be remiss not to mention our favorite part of the evening: the little boy sitting in front of us who absolutely humbled Andrews after she made a joke about how cool she was in high school. Andrews, engaging the audience with little anecdotes about her magical past, sarcastically drew our attention to the fact that being a magician and philosophy enthusiast was definitely the coolest thing to be in high school. It was at this point that the toddler sitting one row ahead of us spoke his truth: “she was not cool in high school!” Thank you to this young comedian for saying what we were all thinking, and being unafraid to do so. 

All in all, while this may not have been the magical evening we were expecting, we did gain a significant amount of insight into the true world of magic, a world of science, psychology, and logic. We had some good laughs, lots of confusion, and will definitely be trying to forget everything we learned so we can go back to blissfully believing in the inexplicable nature of magic.

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