Stacy Bruner
Capellaro (left) with Alex McAleer (“mind reader extraordinaire”) at Overture.
As I get ready to meet Alex the Mind Reader, I recall that, as my mom likes to tell me, I’m a terrible liar. I blush, fearing my face will reveal my secrets.
I worry that I’ll be an easy mark for mind-reading tricks because I have a natural inclination to set skepticism aside. Heck, I believed in Santa Claus until almost my teens.
But the show must go on, so I set aside my trepidation and join Alex McAleer, whose moniker is “mind reader extraordinaire,” in the Overture Center’s lobby.
Alex — who appears with Champions of Magic at Overture on March 2 — hands me a pen and a piece of paper with the words: “Their name was: __________” As I consider the singular/plural construction, he asks me to write down the name of a person — not someone he could easily guess by Googling me. Making sure he can’t see, I jot down “Bruce,” a beloved ex who long ago led me on an adventure into the jungles of South America.
I give him back his pen (is it a trick pen?) and I put the paper in a small, small, manila envelope. I follow some simple instructions (think of the name, think of my own name, say my own name). I become self-conscious pronouncing my own name. (Did he hypnotize me?) Before long, he’s guessing — first a vowel and then a consonant — to get to Bruce. I’ve seen clips of him doing this trick, but I’m telling you: Up close, it works!
Even though he’s recovering from the flu, Alex is a natural charmer who clearly loves his job. He’s a Brit who has an 8-year-old son back home and a wife who is also a performer. Like most magicians, he says, it all started with a magic kit. When he was 14, he bought a book on techniques to improve memory. “One of the first tricks that I learned is sometimes called muscle reading or contact mind reading,” says Alex.
“There’s tiny movements in your arm. It’s called the ideamotor effect where they’re thinking where they want to guide you,” he says, adding that pendulums and ouija boards operate on the same principle. “It’s unconscious movements that, without you realizing them, you are making them move.”
From there, Alex honed his craft until a few years ago when he hooked up with the other magicians to form Champions of Magic. He’s not going to give away his secrets, of course, but gives some hints.
“Part of my job is to make it look like I could pluck anyone out of the room and know everything about them. It doesn’t quite work like that,” says Alex. “Like any magic trick in a show, I’m setting up the parameters, I’m setting up the game.” He doesn’t use actors or audience plants.
As I suspected, nervousness is a factor. “Because that person is standing up onstage in front of a thousand people, they start getting nervous, they start giving away a lot more,” says Alex. “But if that person just walked up to me in a bar, it would be a lot harder for me to be able to read them.”
Champions of Magic had its first tour in the United States last fall. “We had to change the show quite a bit when we brought it to America, because American audiences are different, there’s sort of no denying it,” says Alex.
It’s a relief to hear that my gullibility when it comes to magic is a shared national trait. “People coming to see a magic show in America are much more up for it straightaway,” says Alex. “In England, they tend to be a little more cynical and skeptical. They sort of sit there with their arms folded and try to work it out. Here, the lights go down and the music starts and people go ‘whoo, yes!’ You’re up for a good time.”
Dictators who consulted mentalists: Hitler, Stalin
Brain decoder: Scientists at the University of California Berkeley are working on a device capable of reading people’s inner monologues.
The Amazing Kreskin: This New Jersey-based mentalist likes to have the audience hide his paycheck. If he can’t find it, he doesn’t get paid. He’s in Chicago March 17-18.
Alex the Mind Reader on failure: “It does happen, especially with my kind of magic, that I just get it wrong, or just a little bit off. A little bit off is the most annoying kind for me. I get a letter wrong. Or they were thinking of the six of clubs and I thought it was the six of spades. With a big show, the audience expects it’s part of the trick. There was a famous mentalist in Britain who used to say that failure made the success stronger. And he did fail quite a bit.”
