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Magician reveals secret illusions
Jul 16, 2025
Phia Kantor, age 6, learning how to cut a string in half and make it appear whole again.
Patrick L. Sullivan
FALLS VILLAGE — It’s axiomatic that a magician never reveals the secret behind a trick. Unless it’s a magic lesson.
On Wednesday, July 8, children aged six to 10 came to the David M. Hunt Library to learn magic.
The lesson was taught by Tim O’Brien, a full-time magician since 1996 from Southbury, Connecticut. He learned his first magic trick at seven years old, the same age as some of the kids there.
O’Brien started the lesson by putting a ball into one of his student’s hands and another in his own hand, fists tightly closed. After saying the magic words, which the crowd insisted were “abra-banana,” he opened his hand to reveal the ball had disappeared, which was when his student opened his hand and both of the balls popped out.
The children, a little suspicious at first, were now convinced.
The secret? Practicing sleight of hand.
The students of O’Brien’s “Wizard’s School of Magic” learned all about optical illusions, how to make a knot appear out of thin air with a small piece of rope, how to teleport an elastic band from one side of your hand to the other and how to turn a solid magic wand into rubber.
The new generation of magicians left with their own bag of tricks, magic wand included, to bring home and blow their families’ and friends’ minds.
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Sheri Lloyd instructs a student in how to design a solar car during last week’s Mountaineer summer camp for the region’s middle schoolers.
Ruth Epstein
FALLS VILLAGE — It’s July, but the halls of Housatonic Valley Regional High School were filled with happy young voices the past two weeks as the middle school Mountaineer Camp was underway.
Sixty rising 6th- 7th- and 8th-graders from all Region One schools converged at the high school and then to points beyond to participate in a wide variety of activities.
Under the supervision of Anne MacNeil, the region’s athletic director, and Jill Pace, library specialist at Sharon Center School, the youngsters were not only introduced to experiences they may never have had before, but also to students from the region who they may well meet in later years.
Said MacNeil, “One of the goals of the summer Mountaineer experience is to make new friends. Through this goal, we continue to bring together students in Region One to become friends — to become one region. Our students engage in different activities which allow them to get to know each other and themselves. Whether it is partnering with a new friend in a canoe or working together as a group on a low ropes element, we hope all of our students achieve this goal.”
“We need more opportunities for kids from different schools to get to know each other,” said Pace. “This program is great, especially for those from the smaller towns.” It has grown to a point where there were 20 on a waiting
On one day last week, Sue Saccardi was in charge of a farm-to-table class where she was making focaccia and bagels with the students. She explained the difference of the dough, with the focaccia much lighter than that of the bagels. In another room Sheri Lloyd was directing the children in making solar cars that they then raced. “You engineer it and design it to win,” she said. Nikko Sedgwick was showing a boy how to paint a forest in the art room, Beth Dinneen was demonstrating the use of a 3D printer and at the art garage Kitty Kiefer and Abigail Fifer were watching over young artists as they worked on projects.
Earlier that day, the campers were out and about the region participating in paddleboarding, rock climbing, stream walking, hiking, canoeing, kayaking, playing board games, playing backyard games or swimming at the Town Grove in Lakeville.
The camp is free, made possible through at $60,000 grant from Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, explained Jeanine Rose, Region One assistant superintendent. There was also $22,000 of federal funds available. “This is such a great program,” she said. “It’s wonderful for social interaction and
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Come out, come out, wherever you are
Jul 16, 2025
Have you ever watched a pot of water come to a boil? A pot with cool, still water is placed on a stove and the gas is turned on. At first there are little bubbles forming on the pot bottom, then as the heat builds, the bubbles drift to the surface, more bubbles form and enlarge, rise and the process repeats, expands, grows until the surface is roiling away. America is like that now, as the heated MAGA rhetoric has been turned up, gas bubbles rising, now popping, releasing very heated steam.
The scalding steam you see in our country now comes in the form of verbal rhetoric and even on X postings. Anne Coulter said on X: “We didn’t kill enough Indians.”Other MAGA mouthpieces turn up the heat with statements from the likes of Tony Hinchcliffe calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”Of course, the leader of the pack is always Stephen Miller who claims that “America is for Americans and Americans only” adding, “restore America to the true Americans,” presumably not meaning the Indian nations.
Another loyal MAGA proponent, Rep. Clay Higgens, took aim at Haitian immigrants, “These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, Vodou, nastiest country in the Western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters… All these thugs better get their mind right and their asses out of our country ….” Of course, there’s always Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (interesting they always use her three names, as they do with perpetrators like Lee Harvey Oswald and Jared Lee Loughner of Tucson). Rep. Marjorie is prized for her outlandish BS-heat making with “Jewish space lasers” causing forest fires or arguing that Reps. and Rashida Tlaib were not official members of Congress because they didn’t swear in on the Bible (neither did Trump put his hand on the bible last inauguration either), or that Obama is secretly a Muslim, or equated vaccine requirements to the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust, and, worst of all, once lied that Nancy Pelosi had said that “We need another school shooting.”
When challenged, these folks always resort to, “…we do have freedom of speech. I’ll say what I want.” All the while they perfectly know they are turning up the heat, setting fire to normalcy.
And their “freedom of speech” rhetoric affirmations are bringing whole gangs of MAGA supporters out of hiding, out into the open, like the Neo-Nazi rallies in Nashville, Tennessee, Columbus, Ohio, Portland, Oregon, Cincinnati, Ohio and a town soon near you. And do you see any of them being arrested or charged? That’s part of the usefulness of the MAGA sponsored steam heat, it frightens away true law-enforcement.
So what does one do with a pot of steaming hot water, to which more and more heat is still being applied? Online you can find sensible solutions like, “Listen and Understand” while you disagree, or “Manage your own reactions, keep calm” or “Engage constructively while looking for areas of agreement.”
Or you can do what real Americans do: Hold individuals accountable for using harmful language and lies. But be careful, when their words of stochastic terrorism becomes overwhelming and boils over, you are likely to become aware of your urge for physical retribution —said another way: riots. It is what they are counting on, for you to get so scalded, and then react with violence.
And here’s the lesson: Martin Luther King and Ghandi had it right: Protest in force and numbers non-violently. Oppose them with your presence, be like the young man in Tiananmen Square before those tanks, show up and protest and take the beating, show the real America what is right and expose the real message of fascists. Be the calm of righteousness, not the poison steam of evil. For these people are evil and want to change our nation to gain control over your life — all of your life, every aspect, every moral, every code, every freedom you currently have and will lose if they prevail. We have to oppose them, turn off their heat, before they scald us all.
Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, New York, now lives in Gila, New Mexico.
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