CAB welcomes local magician to campus

Written By Rhianna Davis, For The Globe

The Campus Activities Board (CAB) provided students with a magical start to the last month of the school year with their Let the Magic Begin event on Wednesday, April 4.

The event, which was held in the Lawrence Hall Ballroom from 7-9 p.m., featured local magician Lee Terbosic performing illusions and tricks for students to enjoy.

“We thought it would be a great event for students to kick off the end of the year and see a magic show,” Carmella Cuomo, senior sports, arts and entertainment management major and director of the Special Events Committee for CAB, said in an interview following the event. “We did some research to see who was around Pittsburgh.”

Terbosic, a magician who has previously performed on America’s Got Talent, grew up in Western Pennsylvania. He performs local shows and is known for visiting colleges. Terbosic has been to Point Park before and said he was ecstatic to return to campus to share his magic with students.

“I was 10 years old [when I got into magic],” Terbosic said. “[My parents] took me to the Carnegie Library in Homestead, and that’s where I checked out magic books.”

Since then, he has performed tricks to the likes of Harry Houdini. In 2016, Terbosic mimicked a stunt that Houdini had performed on the corner of Wood and Liberty in Downtown Pittsburgh exactly 100 years prior. Terbosic performed the Houdini-coined “upside down straight jacket escape” and finished the trick by waving a Pittsburgh Steelers’ Terrible Towel.

According to Terbosic, one of his most memorable performances was headlining the Night of Assists event with the Pittsburgh Penguins.

He performed on a stage on the ice in front of thousands of fans and with some of the Penguins players as his assistants, such as Evgeni Malkin and Phil Kessel. Before the performance, he did some close-up magic for the players in the locker room, stunning Penguins’ captain Sidney Crosby.

Let the Magic Begin featured Terbosic performing such tricks as making a bowling ball appear out of a drawing pad and moving a marker-drawn X on his hand to a hand of an audience member.

Kevin Mayhew, a sophomore sports, arts and entertainment management major, came to the event after a friend saw one of CAB’s flyers around campus. He said that he loved the trick in which Terbosic had “needles and thread coming out of his mouth.”

“It is great that CAB has stuff [for students] with the end of the semester coming and finals coming,” Mayhew said. “This place is known for arts and everything, so to see [these types of events] on campus is just amazing.”

CAB’s Special Events Committee predicted about 100 students to attend the event, with a turnout of about 50 students. The event was marketed, like all CAB events, through the use of social media, hotcards and flyers posted around campus.

“We weren’t too sure [of what the turnout would be like] being that it’s getting close to finals week,” Cuomo said.

As the semester comes to an end, CAB has multiple upcoming events scheduled. These include Point Park After Dark’s Extreme Sports Night, Pizza Palooza, Plate Smashing, Field Trip to Phipps and CABchella Spring Fling.