Wow, it’s been a long time since I posted to my personal website. I guess now is as good a time as any to rectify that as this year I have been chosen to serve as Grand Marshal for the 2024 Eastchester Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. The honorees this year are Patty and Billy George and I am thrilled that I will be walking the parade route with them to celebrate. The gala is on March 2 at Lake Isle Country Club and the parade is on Sunday March 10. More details to follow, so save the dates!

If you are interested in sponsoring the parade as a business or as an individual then you can check out my post on eastchester.net.

I’ve signed on to Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter. I don’t yet know how much I’ll use it, but you can find me here -> Mastodon

Last night my wife and I saw “In and of Itself”, Derek DelGaudio’s one man show in NYC.  It was an amazing show, quite entertaining and well staged.  It’s a tough show to describe, a blend of storytelling, magic, and existential commentary that runs about 75 minutes (no intermission).

Two of the magical moments involved audience members, and both were very impressive.  What follows is definitely SPOILERS so you have been warned.

DelGaudio does a trick where he pulls a card and “randomly” calls on an audience member.  He then pulls about ten envelopes from a shelf and asks the audience member to choose one of the envelopes.  The audience member opens the envelope and reads the letter inside.  Amazingly, it’s a personal hand-written letter to that audience member from an old friend.  The audience member on our night did not react as emotionally as DelGaudio expected, and I was also surprised she was so calm about the amazing trick.

So here’s my theory about how the trick is done.  Weeks before each performance the show’s producers research audience members that are attending (they have the purchaser information).  They locate a friend or relative via social media, and ask that friend or relative to write a letter. Alternatively, based on some online comments it’s possible that the producers give free tickets to people who then gift those tickets to someone who is then “targeted” for the letter.

They make enough copies of the letter so they can put the same letter in each envelope, and on the night of the show DelGaudio just calls their name as the “random” audience member.

Note that he doesn’t actually call their name, he calls the description from the “I Am” card that the audience member chose.  That leads to the big trick near the end where DelGaudio accurately names the card chosen by each audience member (or at least those that stand up). That trick is accomplished (IMHO) by the staff tracking each audience member as they enter the theater and the cards are collected.  DelGaudio probably is wearing a discrete audio earpiece and someone backstage is directing him and providing the card name for each audience member.   This is similar to what a “psychic” like John Edwards would do when conducting a session with a crowd and using the “hot reading” technique.

These are just my theories about how those two tricks may have been done.  I am certainly not detracting from the trick, the integration into the story, execution, and production value is amazing.  Have you seen the show and if so how do you think the tricks were done?

For many years I maintained a family tree on our own servers.  That web site is no longer accessible as there were security concerns with the software.  I now maintain family tree data for the Fix, DelVecchio, Connolly and Lanzetti families at the Ancestry.com Roots Web database which is a public database. I also maintain a family tree as part of the regular Ancestry.com service, but you will need an account with them to access the tree.

Probably not new to some, but who knew you could post pages to a WordPress blog using a phone app? Pretty cool, though at the moment I have nothing else of substance to add.