Hailey Martinez
Staff Writer
Friends and family came together at the La Verne Brewing Co. Saturday night to watch the magician Michael Mirth, who shared the stage with performers Miss Orchid Mei and Chris Herren as Faust.
The event was a magic live benefit to raise money for Mirth’s medical expenses. Mirth has been battling cancer for the last eight years.
To start off the event, every ticket holder received a free beverage of their choice. Guests were also able to purchase food by Garcia Grill on the Go, which served pulled pork sliders, grilled smoked wings, quesadillas, nachos and more.
Once everyone was settled, the show began with Herren, who performed sad, comedic and love stories through magic, using the king and queen cards.
“I would always write out my scripts but I’m pretty bad at it, and I can definitely tell a story through magic,” Herren, a professional magician, said. “I started taking classes and it’s what called me and I embraced it.”
He told a story about an arranged marriage, but the woman did not want to marry the man because he had a hunchback.
The man explained that when they were both born, God had to decide who to give the hunchback to, and the man sacrificed himself because the woman was too beautiful to have a hunchback. So God gave the man a hunchback, and from that moment the woman realized that she wanted to marry the man because he did something for her that no one else would do.
After Herren’s performance, Miss Orchid Mei, a professional burlesque performer, came in from the back of the room wearing an elegant green sequin dress.
As she slowly walked her way up to the front of the room, she removed her gloves. Soon after, she removed her dress, which left her in a lovely sparkly two piece costume. She then started fan dancing, which is a very popular technique in burlesque.
“I wanted to be this glamorous individual and feel that confidence, so I found that on the stage and it helped me build the confidence to become that person in my life,” Mei said.
When Mirth performed, he asked the crowd for volunteers to help him perform a magic trick. Many of his tricks were predictions.
“I do something with a hybrid trick that has magic in it,” Mirth said. “And I do a psychic reading at the same time,” Mirth said.
He asked for three volunteers in the crowd and gave them a stack of cards that were passed among the three. Each had to choose one card from the stack of cards, then the stack was returned to Mirth. Once Mirth received the cards, he named all three cards the volunteers had chosen. Everyone was surprised by how he could have found that out because the volunteers did not get up from their seats, nor was he anywhere near them.
Hailey Martinez can be reached at hailey.martinez@laverne.edu.
Hailey Martinez is a junior journalism major with a photography minor. She is a staff writer for the Campus Times and a staff photographer for the Campus Times and La Verne Magazine.
