Francis Henvrick, a Cuyahoga Falls High School senior, didn’t know what to expect when she was the first of several audience members to be brought on stage Friday night by Bill Blagg.
Soon after, Blagg had suspended Henvrick in midair.
“It was the coolest experience of my life,” said Henvrick, who is hoping to become a student in Ohio University’s Scripps School of Journalism. “I didn’t even know I was levitating.”
Blagg, a magician from Zion, Ill., came to the Templeton-Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium Friday to perform his latest set of magic tricks and illusions.
These tricks included moving through metal, cutting a rope and putting it back together, predicting the future, and making himself disappear and reappear behind the audience.
“My favorite trick is when he went from the front of the stage to the back,” Drew Carter, a 9-year-old visitor, said.
One of the night’s most memorable tricks began with a story of Blagg’s childhood lemonade stand. In order to compete in the neighborhood, he offered customers a milk carton and promised that it would produce any drink they wanted.
During his trick, Blagg then filled a carton with chocolate milk and gave a glass of it to his assistant, a 9-year-old audience member, to drink in order to confirm that the substance was indeed chocolate milk.
“Evan, you’re in college. You have to chug that,” Blagg said as his assistant downed the glass.
Blagg continued, pouring white milk, strawberry milk, Coke, 7UP, orange soda, grape juice and lemonade from the carton. Each time, audience members drank the beverages to confirm that they were real.
Andrew Holzaepfel, associate director of the Campus Involvement Center, said that the show was designed to appeal to families, and bring out people of all ages.
“I heard a lot of positive feedback from students that brought their younger sib to the show,” Holzaepfel said. “The show turned out to be a great family night out that really worked well on Sibs Weekend.”
wh092010@ohiou.edu
