With an impish grin, Oz Pearlman slipped a hand into his pocket, fetched one of his black business cards and pressed it into my palm. He nudged me to turn it over.
On the back, Mr. Pearlman had scribbled the letters of the alphabet in jumbled order. He retook the card, sparked a lighter and hovered the card over the flame. Nearly all the letters vanished from the paper. Those that remained formed a word, someone’s name. The name, as promised, was that of my seventh-grade girlfriend. Mr. Pearlman beamed.
It was a chilly October night, and Mr. Pearlman was sitting for an interview just offstage after executing similarly confounding feats for more than a thousand people aboard the U.S.S. Intrepid, a decommissioned aircraft carrier docked on the West Side of Manhattan.
Mr. Pearlman, a.k.a. “Oz the Mentalist,” is a professional disorienter. He’s a practitioner of mentalism, a subset of magic grounded in a performer’s ability to create the illusion of mind-reading and, on occasion, mind control. Often, he appears to know things no stranger should know.
That evening, Mr. Pearlman, 43, had been the dinner entertainment at a lavish gathering hosted by Zeta Global, a tech company. He had landed the gig after impressing Zeta’s C.E.O., David A. Steinberg, over lunch last summer. Serena Williams glided through the venue; Tom Brady had made an appearance at Zeta’s event earlier in the day. Mr. Pearlman had the unenviable task of following an earsplitting set by the electro-pop duo the Chainsmokers. Clad in a Paul Smith suit, he cast his line out to the sea of attendees, asking a version of a standard cocktail party question:
If you could have dinner with one person, dead or alive, who would it be?
Mr. Pearlman successfully guessed one man’s choice (Winston Churchill), then a woman’s (Prince), then, after some light ribbing, another man’s (Jennifer Aniston). With each new trick, he dialed up his ambition. Members of the crowd toggled between approving hoots and quizzical murmurs. More than a few looked at tablemates in bewilderment.
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