Professor stuns class

Magician and professor, Barry Gordemer, performs a mystifying card trick as students, Kirsten Klohr and Chloe Dechellis, observes on Thursday, Oct. 2, 2014 at American University. (Photo by Jaclyn Merica) 

          American University professor, puppeteer, and magician, Barry Gordemer, entertained his class with a card trick on Thursday afternoon. He said that it was going to be a mind trick, like the ones that Obi Wan Kenobi performed in the Star Wars movies.   

Gordemer calls himself the “Sort-of-Amazing Barry.” He said it’s more accurate since he only does little tricks. Although they’re simple, he said that these tricks make people wonder if magic really exists.

The act all started when the professor told his class that something amazing was going to happen that day. He brought the cards out, and we realized that he was going to show us a magic trick, but many students thought that Gordemer was going to show something different. Student, Nikki Gale, said she expected Gordemer to bring in a puppet that he had made and have a conversation with it.

The magician then said to his class that he was going to do a mind trick on them. He explained that we would think that we are in control of our own thoughts, but we actually won’t be.

Gordemer shuffled the cards and split the class into teams. He handed each team five cards and asked them to choose one without letting him know which one they chose. All teams picked a card, shuffled their cards, and gave them back to him. Then he said that he was going to figure out each team’s card.

Gordemer took the cards and laid them in rows of five. To help him, he asked the teams to point out which row their card was in while he waved his hand over the rows. He chose Chloe Dechellis’s team’s right, then Matt Morrissey’s, but when he got to Shavawn White’s, he waited to guess. Instead, he gave her an envelope. He skipped to guess Nikki Gale’s and Hanya Bruner’s teams’ right.

Gordemer came back to White, and asked her to open the envelope. White opened it, and shouted. Inside the envelope was a post-it note with her team’s card, the ace of clubs, written on it. The whole class was shocked.

When I asked White what she was expecting in the envelope, she said she thought that it had confetti or something crazy in it. Even though it didn’t have anything that extravagant, White said that she was still very surprised. 

Gordemer said that he likes to do this trick because it is so mystifying since there is no way to explain it. “I know the principal, and I’m still amazed it works,” he said.