It could have been a long, boring wait for Winona State Warrior basketball fans lining the sidewalks outside McGown Gymnasium waiting to get inside for the big game on March 18.
It certainly wasn’t boring when a man showed up on the boulevard with a hammer and a four and a half inch nail and proceeded to drive it into his face.
He then asked a female fan to pull it from his flesh. She squeamishly complied.
This man driving nails into his face was magician Brian Brushwood.
The University Programming Activities Committee brought him to town.
After the warrior’s victory, many of those basketball fans walked over to Somsen Auditorium to watch of Brushwood’s bizarre magic show. For those who didn’t make it to the show, here is a taste of what you missed.
Human Block Head
At the performance, Brushwood demonstrated the nail-in-the-face trick again. He calls it “the human block head.”
He asked a student in the front row to inspect the nail to see that it didn’t bend or collapse. The nail passed the inspection.
A student was called on stage to pull out the nail that appeared to have penetrated the area above Brushwood’s lip. He told her she could keep the nail.
Disgusted by it, she tried to give it back but finally gave in and walked off stage with it.
“That’s better than an autograph; that’s DNA,” Brushwood said.
Eating Fire
Brushwood opened the show by performing several different methods of eating fire and describing in detail the history of fire eating. He knows this history well because he wrote a book about it.
Concrete Block Smashed Over the Head
The potentially self-destructive acts continued as Brushwood brought out his hammer again. He set a concrete block weighing over thirty pounds on top of his head and held the hammer in his right hand.
Before swinging the hammer up to the block, he joked about the audiences always being more concerned about his carefully spiked hair being damaged than his skull being damaged.
With one swoop of the hammer, the concrete block crumbled to the floor. Brushwood’s skull was just fine, but some dust needed to be brushed out of his two-inch spiked hair.
Mind Reading
Brushwood asked for a volunteer from the audience who likes to read.
He called a student on stage and gave her the choice of three books: The Da Vinci Code, The Shining and a Harry Potter book.
She selected Harry Potter.
He then instructed her to choose any word in the book that stood out to her with the exception of character names or chapter headings.
He asked if the word starts
with the same letter as a four-legged animal. She replied that it started with the same letter as hippopotamus.
Brushwood wrote what he suspected to be the word she had selected on a piece of tag board.
When he was done writing, she said the word she had found was “half-heartedly.” He flipped the card around, revealing the same word, “half-heartedly,” in block letters.
The crowd gasped in awe.
These are just a few tricks that amazed Brushwood’s audience of Winona State students. He also drove a skewer through his tongue and pushed a pin through his eye and then blew it out his nose.
Questions or comments?
Contact Lydia at LCOglesb3075@winona.edu