Last Friday, Rowan After Hours (RAH) hosted their first live show of the semester featuring Joel Meyers, well-known magician and comedian who has been featured on TV shows such as  “America’s Got Talent,” “Penn & Teller’s Fool Us” and “Fake Off.”

Meyers commented on how his life has changed as a result of being on shows like these.

“In the last few years, it has impacted my life a lot because I end up touring a lot more, I have bigger crowds,” Meyers said. “I can be in a college where I’m performing for a couple hundred people or I could be in a room [performing] for thousands of people.”

Currently on tour, Meyers described his experience performing on campuses across the East coast.

“I love performing at colleges,” Meyers said. “College crowds really get my humor. I don’t really get worn out by performing for everybody – that’s the fun part. The traveling part’s the hard part. I always say I get paid to travel, [but] I do the show for free because I have fun with everybody at the show.”

Around 9 p.m., students began packing into the Chamberlain Student Center, despite an untimely rainstorm and flooding, to see Meyers perform.

Krista Vollbrecht, a freshman biological sciences major, expressed her excitement for the upcoming show.

“It’s going to be be fun,” Vollbrecht said. “I love to laugh and Rowan offers it for free, so why not? I think it’s really cool that he’s a comedian and a magician.”

The show officially began at 10 p.m. after a few mini-games led by RAH staff. Meyers opened with a smaller magic trick before calling volunteers from the audience onstage.

Freshman early childhood education major Gia Nardi took part in Meyers’ Russian roulette trick, which involved a sharp nail hidden inside a brown paper bag. She expressed her fearful excitement during the segment.

“It was good, I was just scared that I was going to hurt him,” Nardi said. “But, everything worked out. It was really cool because this was the first time I had ever gone onstage before.”

Another trick that shocked attendees was Meyers’ séance performance, in which a dead celebrity was called upon to guess the initials of the participant’s loved one. Meyers noted the trick as being especially unique to his repertoire.

“The séance routine where we contact the ghost – we came up with the whole thing,” Meyers said. “The floating table idea is a really old concept where that table floats, but to make a giant Ouija board where the table floats from letter to letter and tells the person who they’re thinking of – that’s a really original idea that I came up with.”

After the performance, Meyers gave autographs, took pictures with the attendees and expressed his satisfaction with his performance at Rowan.

“You guys are fantastic,” Meyers said. “Everybody was super easy and everybody was so sweet. I would love to come back to Rowan.”

The event closed out with some light-hearted karaoke and free midnight food.

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