Never take a tapas recommendation from a frat boy

Any ambition I had to keep a lighter schedule while in Boulder has quickly gone by the wayside, as I have booked myself at least 25% more things to do than I can actually do already. Luckily, most of these things are shows that I want to see, and I can miss a show without anybody noticing. Tonight was my first night house managing for "Sex Lives of Teenage Girls", a show created by MFACP graduates that weaves interviews with teenage girls and parents and presumably a woman who studies such things, into a short performance that takes place in a public restroom at the performance center. My job is to cram about 25 people into this tiny bathroom and then shut the door, leaving them in complete darkness. A typical day at the theater.
The break down of this complicated site-specific (or as Jonathan Walters taught me was the hip new term, "site relevant") piece, made me late for the 9PM show I was going to see. I haven't had a drink in several days, and while I don't like to think of myself as an alcoholic, I thought it was due time for a martini. I stopped by the local tapas bar while waiting for the next show, and sat by a lovely fountain in the courtyard. So far my observation of Boulder-ites has left me with the impression that at least a third of this town is composed of the cultural sub-group "frat boys", or as Joel calls them, "Bras". Not like the women's garment--just think of a surfer dude saying "bro". Anyhow, I think my waiter was dangerously close to falling into this category, but I asked him for a recommendation anyway, and he veered me away from the scallop ceviche and convinced me to order empanadas. To make a not very long and rather boring story short, though my martini was excellent, the turnover pastry was almost all dough and reminded me of the Pillsbury croissants in a can.
Next was on to the magic show. There were only 7 audience members at this 10:30 PM performance on a Sunday night. I wouldn't have been there myself, as it didn't look like "real" theater, but what else did I have to do? It turns out that this was my favorite fringe experience so far. This fellow demonstrated what I believe to be true psychic powers--that is, a mental capacity far beyond the average human who has not studied at such things. Several of his demonstrations were beyond anything that I could guess at, and at the end he did show us a magic trick that is based on memory, that was still astonishing. He essentially memorized a half deck of cards in 15 seconds, and accurately determined which cards he had seen and which he hadn't in almost as much time. I once met a magician on the Bread and Puppet farm in Vermont, who I believed for a moment had actually read my mind. Of course, the first step to being a magician is to have charm and confidance--these are the kind of people that were either going to be magicians or cult leaders. This fellow asked me to think of a verb, any verb. I thought of "running", which was something I did regularly at the time. He guessed "running". He could have left me hanging, believing fully that he had read my mind, but he revealed the only trick behind it--that the majority of people say "running". He does get these guesses wrong from time to time, but he still wins over the majority, which is all a magician can hope for.
SO, was the magician I saw tonight using such tricks, predicting everything that everybody would do because we are all just sheep, or pre-programmed androids? Perhaps. I would like to think that it was fate. And the amazing powers of the human brain to remember, even things that haven't happened yet.