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By Alexander Oliveira
Hometown Weekly Reporter
On Thursday, November 29, the Needham Council on Aging was treated to an afternoon of magic and dry humor by Malik the Magician.
With the crowd gently murmuring, a bald man in a black vest – exactly what the mind’s eye conjures when envisioning an act called “Malik the Magic Guy” – took the stage with three lengths of rope in his hands. “When you’re a full-time comedy magician, like me, and one of your siblings is a doctor and the other a teacher, like mine, Thanksgiving is not fun,” Malik said as he jostled the rope between his hands.
“Can’t you make them disappear?” somebody called from the crowd.
Betty helps Malik with the inventively-named ‘Gold Ball and Bag Trick.’ Photos by Alexander Oliveira
“I’m very bad naming my tricks, so ladies and gentlemen, here is The Rope Trick,” he then said. Without further introduction, he was off.
Malik’s hands began to move, then miraculously, the three lines became one, formed a loop, tied up into a knot, then broke apart and back into three pieces again. “And that’s the rope trick.”
“I’ve been a comedy magician for twenty years,” Malik told the crowd as he prepared his next trick. Silence fell over the room. “That’s how my family reacts too,” he said, erupting laughter from the crowd.
What followed was an hour of mind-bending tricks and illusions, casually performed and pocked with jabs of self and audience-deprecating humor that kept the crowd constantly chuckling and wowed by the magic. More than one exclamation of “what the heck!” was heard as golf balls disappeared, playing cards miraculously changed color, and Malik read the mind of a volunteer, guessing the word he’d randomly selected from a book.
“By the rules of The League of Bald Magicians, I’m required to perform at least one serious card trick today,” Malik told the crowd as he prepared his grand finale. Malik asked a volunteer from the crowd to write her name on a playing card. With “Sandy” inked on the two of diamonds, Malik proceeded to shuffle and cut the deck, then reshuffle and recut it several times over. Reaching into his back pocket, he pulled out a wallet that was zippered shut. Holding the wallet aloft, Malik slowly undid the zipper and let the wallet drop open. The ID holder dropped down and revealed not just any two of diamonds, but one with a single word scrawled in black ink across the top: “Sandy.”
