Imagine someone invited you on stage, made your cell phone disappear, hid it in a bag, smashed all the bags and then handed you a Pringles container to make you feel better – with your phone inside.

Well, that was just one of the tricks Norman Ng performed at Colton Chapel on Jan. 27 during his show, “The Norman Magic Experience.”

“I liked how he pretended he messed up and the phone was actually smashed,” Tom Weir ’19 said. “It added a nice touch of humor. Definitely a lot of fun.”

Ng has been performing throughout North America for over 24 years, according to his website. The magician named “America’s Best Variety Act” by Campus Activities Magazine traveled from Maine to perform an interactive show at Lafayette.

After the cell phone trick, Ng tried to convince audience members he was not hiding anything from them. He brought out a piece of Walmart rope and asked audience members to touch it in order to validate that it was real. Once he got the rope back, he separated the rope into pieces and it looked like it magically tied back together.

Ng also proved to the crowd he could guess the serial number of the dollar bill from a random participant, but then made the dollar disappear altogether. Instead, a treasure map appeared in his hand. The map led to a seat in the audience where there was a box. When the box was opened, there was the dollar. Ng did not even leave the stage.  

But Ng did not only perform tricks – he tried to teach audience members how to do them, too. He showed the audience how to distract participants in order to deceive them.

One of Ng’s other tricks was when asked the audience to plan a party and showed a completely sealed envelope, which included the recipe for the party. Once students had shared what they wanted the party to include, Ng revealed that the paper inside the sealed envelope had each request for the party plans on it. He got it right: the audience wanted a Disney-themed party with tacos and Beyoncé.

Ng’s last trick was another mind-bender. He asked a student to come on stage and pick a card. The student volunteer was going to throw a deck of cards in the air at the same time she threw another card she had chosen, and Ng would swing a hockey stick. The hockey stick was supposed to stick to the card she had chosen, but she missed the target and the audience was in hysterics. Still, Ng still found her exact card.

“It was unique to any magic shows I’ve seen before, which was pretty refreshing,” Taylor Bruner ’20 said. “I was impressed by his tricks and couldn’t stop laughing, so it was definitely worth my time.”