Story and Photographs by Lorcan Otway
STAMFORD — The Venue for the magic show is the old train station, currently the home of the Stamford Historical Society. Passenger trains stopped coming here in 1954. Freight trains stopped coming to Stamford in the late 1970s. It is well preserved and full of the history of the village, bringing back my warm memories of Stamford in the 1960s and 1970s and instructing on the history of the town for much longer than that.
Terry Bradshaw is showing early arrivals the exhibits before she introduces the show, explaining that the rows of seats came out of the Stamford Opera House, which used to stand across from Stamford Coffee.
The Amazing Great, Brian Foley, warms up the crowd ten minutes before the start of the show with close up magic and imaginative and amusing patter. As people enter, Brian asks their name, memorizing the names of the entire audience. While we wait, he shows the audience a puzzle trick with four quarters, moving them from a diamond shape into a straight line.
There is a family present with two young kids, who are here after seeing an announcement for the show in the Mountain Eagle (shameless plug to get in good with the chief...) The older child, Liam, comes up to try and figure out the puzzle. His little sister, Leah is very shy. Brian promises Liam that he will teach him the answer to the puzzle at the end of the show.
Brian honed his act busking, doing street performance. As a former busker myself, I see his ability to sense what captures the audience. Ulla enters and he asks where her name comes from, she says, Sweden. He asks if she speaks Swedish and she tells him she does. He tells her in Swedish, that he does not speak Swedish. He explains that busking, he learned to say in almost every language "I don't speak the language in question." The others in the audience hear me speaking to that person in their language and they think, Gee he speaks all these languages."
Just how amazingly great is Brian Foley? In July, he did a show in Otsego, 100% of the proceeds went to benefit the Oneonta Veterans Outreach Center. Pretty great. Brian tells me that Terry Bradshaw was the moving party behind getting him to do the show for the vets. Kudos to them both. Not a single member of the audience was disappointed on this night, in Stamford, unless they were expecting the British Hymnist, Brian Foley. If they were, they didn't let on. They also missed him by a continent and twenty six years. Or, should they remember the words of Brian Foley:
"I write intoxicated by doubt; the doubt that we've already been written by those things we run into the world with or that the world reeks upon us; that our language is born inadequate and only perseveres a release after a bright scrutiny's been made of it; that we should feel the ambience of shame without knowing the responsibility of what causes it."
Though his magic show may leave you "intoxicated by doubt," That too, is not this Brian Foley. This is our own Brian Foley of the Catskill Mountains.
Brian is very adept at card tricks, object manipulation. 'I don't want you to think I read minds, I want you to experience what it would feel like if I read your mind." It is not enough that he makes it appear that a deck of cards defies the laws of reality... it also must feed a good joke in the patter.
I don't want to describe the tricks, because I want you to see the unexpected when you go to his show, and go to his show you should, when you see it announced next in the Mountain Eagle (second shameless plug.)
Brian's heroes and inspirations are a who's who of modern stage magic. Starting of course with Houdini, he lists Cardini, Richard Valentine Pitchford. Pitchford began to hone his card abilities in the frozen trenches of WWI, and as a result taught himself to manipulate cards while wearing gloves. Next he lists Dai Vernon, David Frederick Wingfield Verner, the Canadian born magician who spent his last years at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles. He names Ed Mario, who was the first to use the term "cardician" for his card manipulation. The great Ricky Jay, is another one of Brian's heroes. I believe he came to our theater on occasion to see Monday Night Magic.
Brian was born and grew up in Brooklyn and the place simply did not speak to his soul. He hated it. But, he visited Oneonta while looking at colleges, saw the mountains and the trees and knew this was where he was meant to spend the rest of his life, and so far, has.
The Amazing announces that he does not use kids in the show, as he "is a mean kind of magician." At the start of the show, he asks Leah, the youngest child in the audience, if she is actually a short adult. She is too shy to answer him. He asks her age, she looks down. He asks her to show with her fingers how old she is. Her mother says "eight." He asks her if she is eight or eighty. So he asks Leah, an eight year old to come up, and cut the cards for the next trick. He offers her his thumb rather than his hand to lead her up to the stage. It is clear she finds this less daunting than the big hands of the large fellow. By the end of the show, Leah is leaning on the table where Brian is doing his tricks, learning the solution to the coin puzzle, now with Brian her new friend.
By the end of the show he has included nearly every member of the audience in his tricks and illusions. The fact that he calls them up by name remembering all the names of the audience members helps to bond with the audience. There isn't a member of the audience who has not enjoyed the show.
Brian has let most of the audience into a trick, one he will play on a late-comer. So, when he pulls it off, they all feel involved and let into the trick, but... there it is a hook. They think it is the two illusions they have been cued into. Brian throws in an unexpected third illusion that stumps the whole audience who thought they had been let into the trick. Brilliant.
