ERIC BRADY The Roanoke Times

Illusionist Shawn Anthony performs a card trick for students in Kate Campbell's third-grade class at Roanoke Catholic School on Friday afternoon. Anthony did a show Friday evening at the Roanoke Performing Arts Theatre and will take the stage again tonight.

Bryant Guilfoyle, 8 years old and planted cross-legged on the floor, front and center, raised his hand along with the rest of his classmates.

He was called upon, so he cheekily asked the magician: "I know I'm not supposed to ask you this, but how do you do it?"

A good magician never reveals his secrets, of course, but Shawn Anthony, dressed in black from his dark hair down to his shoes, shared one tidbit: practice, practice, practice.

A good magician practices every trick more than 1,000 times, he said.

Anthony, in town for a two-night appearance at the Roanoke Performing Arts Theatre, amazed the 28 students in Kate Campbell's third-grade class at Roanoke Catholic School on Friday afternoon. He taught them about Harry Houdini and optical illusions, made a deck of cards come out of his mouth, and showed them some behind-the-scenes trickery. Not to worry, parents -- making the children float in the air or disappear was "not in my clause," he said.

Bryant, a Roanoke County youngster, wanted to learn a trick so he could perform it in front of a crowd. He wants to be a football player, or maybe even a magician, when he grows up, he said.

Before Anthony vanished along with his handler after his 20-minute appearance, he taught a version of the classic "pick a card, any card" trick to the class with the help of an assistant, Amelie Peccoud, 8. A sleight-of-hand move and a bit of misdirecting his audience were the secrets to getting the assistant to slide her card into the deck upside down, revealing its identity to the magician.

Campbell, who's taught for 22 years, had asked Anthony to visit her class because they had read two stories: "Houdini: Master of Escape" by Michael Teitelbaum, a biography of the early 20th-century magician, and "Opt: An Illusionary Tale" by Arline and Joseph Baum, a story incorporating classic optical illusions.

"The children were fascinated by the idea that you could see something that really wasn't there," Campbell said.

The students remembered the most famous of Houdini's great escapes when Anthony asked them: when Houdini vanished from a locked wooden case, called a metamorphosis; when he escaped from a glass tank filled with water, called the Chinese water torture cell.

Anthony will test Houdini's record for escaping a mailbag in his show at the Roanoke Performing Arts Theatre, he said. He will be handcuffed and shackled inside a 7-foot-tall water-tight mailbag. He has to escape before the oxygen runs out after three minutes.

The next logical question from a third-grader: What if he doesn't escape?

"I'm hoping everyone in the audience will be so excited and clapping so much that even if I don't get out, they won't care," he said. "If I don't get out, they'll have to come and release me out of the bag."