Posted in a Chicago Suntimes review!
Scott Xavier knows what you’re thinking. He’ll prove it on Sunday, Oct. 16 when Xavier presents “Mind vs. Magic: Mind Reading and Beyond…” at the Skokie Theatre.
Xavier promises that the show will be “an interactive, 80-minute presentation of mind reading and those paranormal mysteries such as psychic metal bending.” Check YouTube for an advance peek at what he will be doing to cutlery.
“I’m going to transfer a thought from one person’s head to another in a pretty interesting way,” he said. “There’s going to be some crazy pickpocketing. There’s going to be some hypnosis.”
It’s complicated
One of the things Xavier does that seems to draw the most response from audiences is when he asks a volunteer to think of a number and then Xavier comes up with that number — but not the usual way. He creates a four-by-four grid in which all of the numbers going across and all of the numbers going down add up to the volunteer’s number. So do the numbers on a diagonal and in the four corners.
Six years ago, it would have been hard to predict that Xavier would pursue such an unusual career. That’s when he took a leave of absence from his job at the Illinois State Police Crime Lab to deal with his diabetes and because “I didn’t feel fulfilled there,” he said.
Xavier, who has an associate’s degree in psychology, started looking for alternative careers. “I’m really good with technology so I designed websites for a while,” he said.
Then he saw someone do a card trick. “The card trick was so close to being psychic, I back-engineered a method using psychology where I could break into the person’s body language,” Xavier said. “By asking him a series of questions, I could tell if it was a red card, a black card, a heart, a diamond, a number card, a picture card.”
Xavier showed his method to the magician and asked him if that’s how he did it. The magician’s response was, “No, I was using a trick deck of cards.”
That response stunned Xavier, who spent the next year studying everything he could about magic and psychology. He created what he considers a unique performance.
Know the language
“There’s no way to transmit thoughts,” Xavier admitted. “But there is a way to detect if people are lying, if they’re uncomfortable. Their body language reveals a lot.”
Xavier has performed at trade shows and for Fortune 500 companies. “Afterwards, I’ll do memory seminars and lie detection seminars where I’ll teach them how to remember every one of their customers’ names by visual associations,” he said.
Not only does Xavier read minds, he also does some mind-boggling stunts. For one college show, he wore a straightjacket and hung upside down, 75 feet in the air — from a burning rope attached to a crane. Below him was a pit filled with broken glass and razor blades. The stunt was all the more remarkable because Xavier is afraid of heights. “It was probably the most intense, crazy and unforgettable thing I’ve ever done,” Xavier said.
Xavier won’t be dangling from a burning rope at the Skokie Theatre. What he will do, he said, is “use science to make the impossible look possible.”
