by MARK SLUTSKY

Dedicating his life to the study of the mysteries and potential of the human mind, Marc Salem has studied under the likes of legendary sociologist Erving Goffman, assisted the FBI, and has been called in to assist at dozens of court cases. But the man is also an entertainer. With his unscripted show, Mind Games, Salem uses his academic training and natural abilities to seemingly read people's minds. His powers are uncanny: Salem can deduce the serial number of a bill in an audience member's wallet or describe the last vacation they took, among other things. The Mirror communicated verbally with the thought-reader from his home in New York City.

Mirror: How do you describe what it is you do?

Marc Salem: I am a player of mind games. I literally pick up, receive, guide, influence and play games with people's heads. I'm trained as a psychologist; what I do is not supernatural, what I do is not a cult. However I am a sensitive. I'm considered one of the world's authorities in non-verbal communication. How the mind creates reality has been much of my work. I've been a college professor for over 20 years - I was a director of research at Children's Television Workshop, the producers of Sesame Street. I've pulled together all sorts of things to create an entertaining theatrical show.

M: Your show consists of interacting with individual audience members.

MS: Let me give you a typical beginning: I take a ball of paper, which I call my high-tech randomizer, and toss it to the audience. Whoever catches it is the first person I use. They toss it to someone else and that's the second person, who tosses it to someone else and that's the third person I use. I let them each pick a number and I tell them what number they picked. That's the beginning right there. Right away I'm involving the audience, and it's totally random. I don't travel with any stooges, I don't use plants, I don't use any hidden electronics. We offer $100,000 to anyone who can demonstrate that I'm using any of those things. To so many people it's the obvious answer, but, in fact, if you think for two minutes and look at the show you'd say, "Well, how would electronics help him anyhow?" But people in this electronics age love to have that as something to hang on. But my whole show comes in a briefcase. A few pens, a few pieces of paper and the minds of an audience.

M: So you're a mind-reader?

MS: Mind reading? I don't know what that means. It's closer to thought reading: thought is something that's guided, that's influenced. It's what advertisers do, what writers do. I am a sensitive, not in a supernatural sense, but my senses are very acute, my hearing is very acute. I can see one frame of film footage and make a distinction between another as they're moving through a projector at 1/27th of a second... I do hundreds of legal cases. I did the biggest jury selection in American history, the biggest payout in American history. I was called in every case from the O.J. case to the Ramsey case. I do analysis in other sorts of truth and lie situations.

M: When did you notice that you were more sensitive than other people?

MS: I think genetically, my dad was the same way. He was very highly attuned, very empathetic to other people. He was a clergyman, a rabbi. Which was basically my calling as well, but what happened to him was, because he was unable to remove himself from his congregants' pain, he died at the age of 41, leaving a family and three boys. This was a heavy warning. The warning basically was: I don't have the constitution to worry about other peoples' problems. I'll worry about my own family. I will teach and I will guide but I will never advise. I'm a psychologist and I've never taken a patient. I do absolutely no counselling whatsoever. Now what I do do is teach. I teach police, I teach students and I teach them ways to use a wide range of techniques for them to do guidance, for them to find things, for them to understand it, for them to do it. But I will not do it. My venues are the theatre and the classroom.

Marc Salem's Mind Games plays at the Centaur Theatre (453 St-François-Xavier) July 9–20, 8pm
(Saturdays 5pm and 8pm) $29.50

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