The threat of showers and thunderstorms could not make the audience disappear at Jeff Quinn's magic show to kick off the summer reading program at the Grand Island Public Library.
After all the seats were filled, the crowd became standing-room-only and sitting-on-the-floor room only to see the "world premiere" of Quinn's new magic show.
"You're the first ones to see this show," Quinn told Thursday evening's audience members. "Is that cool?"
"Yeah," responded the kids in the audience.
While Thursday night was the first time for the show, it was far from the first time Quinn has appeared at the Grand Island Public Library.
When asked how many times he's appeared at the library, Quinn had to think out loud -- muttering "Six, seven years?" under his breath -- before acknowledging that it has been enough times that he had lost the exact count.
He did know that Thursday was the first time he had ever kicked off the library's summer reading program.
In past years, the kickoff has featured a scavenger hunt through the library. But Children's Librarian Merry von Seggern said organizers wanted to give students more time to actually check out books.
That philosophy apparently was effective as several young people walked into Quinn's show clutching books that they had checked out from the library.
After the show, von Seggern urged parents and children to return to the children's library area to pick up book bags containing the library's summer calendar of events and the all-important reading record that tracks how many books each student has read.
Students become eligible for prizes with each 10 books they read and schools become eligible for the traveling reading trophy based on the school with the highest percentage of students who read at least 10 books this summer.
The theme for this summer's program is "Catch the Reading Bug."
Appropriately, Quinn changed the traditional magic word of "Abracadabra" into "Ab-bug-cadabra" for Thursday's show.
In addition to practicing his magic tricks for the show, the magician obviously had done his own reading and research. He told audience members that Earth has 10 quintillion insects.
"That's a 10 with 18 zeroes," he said. "That's 200 million bugs for everybody on earth. It makes me feel creepy-crawly. Half of them are crickets in my basement right now."
At another point in his show, Quinn revealed that there are 8 million different species of insects, versus just 5,000 species of mammals.
"We're outnumbered folks...better stock up on Raid," he said.
Using a young volunteer from the audience, Quinn introduced three invisible fleas for one of his early feats of magic. Eventually, Quinn put the fleas into a container with pink, purple, green and blue scarves.
The scarves quickly began flying out of the container toward his young assistant and Quinn blamed the fleas for the mayhem.
Quinn next revealed a scarf with a caterpillar, with the youngsters quickly noting that caterpillars turn into butterflies. With the help of a little magic, that is exactly what happened to the caterpillar on the scarf.
With a little bit more magic, the butterfly and scarf grew into an even bigger butterfly and scarf.
Quinn said people should appreciate butterflies and bees, because they fly from flower to flower, collecting nectar and pollen. Without those two insects, the world would have no flowers.
The magician illustrated his point by running his butterfly scarf through an empty tube, which eventually broke apart in a display of paper flowers.
Kids laughed delightedly when Quinn searched for "Natalie the Gnat" in an ever smaller series of bags. Each time Quinn turned a bag inside out to find Natalie, the bag changed both colors and patterns, going from solids to stripes to dots.
After finally locating Natalie, Quinn proclaimed "the world's strongest gnat" would lift a playing card from the top of a table. Instead, the entire table levitated.
"Natalie is stronger than I thought," said Quinn after the table returned to earth.
Quinn asked for another young audience volunteer, outfitting her with a beekeeper's headgear and then donning beekeeper's headgear himself. He promised that 75 bees would burst forth from the container. Fortunately, what actually erupted from the container posed no danger of stinging anyone.
For his "last" trick, Quinn pulled three squirmy plastic centipedes from a treasure chest and finally pulled a deck of playing cards from the chest.
Then, he read the "warning" he had been threatening to read during his entire show. When his reading concluded, the centipedes demonstrated why he should have read the cautionary message earlier in the evening. That surprise was the final trick of the evening.
Quinn will reprise his magic show at 10 a.m. Friday.
