Jay Alexander
Magician Class of 1986
Among decades-old posters for storied acts such as the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin, the décor at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore music venue includes a playing card signed by Mick Jagger affixed to a pane of glass.
The card is not a Rolling Stones artifact, though, but rather a tribute to Jay Alexander, a magician who entertained the band there years ago. One of Alexander’s signature set pieces has an audience member sign a card. He then hurls the deck upward with one card — the card — sticking to the ceiling. The Stones were sufficiently wowed that they brought Alexander along on subsequent tour dates.
“Think of that place’s rich history, all the great bands that have passed through,” Alexander says. “And there’s my playing card. It’s pretty flattering.”
Alexander didn’t study magic at HSPVA, simply because HSPVA has never had a magic program. “Most people think I must’ve studied acting,” he says. Instead, he was in the school’s media department, where he worked on skills ranging from arty (photography) to practical (writing press releases). Even before the advent of Photoshop, he loved manipulating photographs and doing trick photography. Or building sculptures and projecting videos onto them.
Alexander’s interest in magic was triggered by finding props used by his great-grandfather, a vaudevillian performer. He worked weekends in Houston, performing at birthday parties through his teens. After graduation, Alexander left Houston for the San Francisco Art Institute. There he continued his childhood appreciation of magic, which resulted in good business that started with the dot-com boom, as tech companies hired Alexander to perform at corporate events. Today, those types of shows remain his bread and butter, though he also performs publicly.
He strongly believes his success started at HSPVA. “Obviously, the artistic side of it is important, but there’s another side of it, too,” he says. “Working on performing skills, social skills, learning to deal with people, and not just as an artist. And then there were the other kids there. It blows me away who all came out of the school. Being around other people who were so excited at that age about what they were doing. Just realizing that’s an option available to you as a kid, it makes you passionate about everything.”
And it all started with rejection. Alexander applied to HSPVA after his sophomore year at Westbury. His grades didn’t pass muster, and he wasn’t accepted. Alexander walked into class his first day as a junior at Westbury and tried a disappearing act.
“I called my grandmother and told her I got in and needed a ride to HSPVA,” he says. “Not knowing better, she dropped me off.”
He asked to see the principal and was told to wait.
“I explained to her that I was going to quit school if I didn’t get in,” he says. “She said it didn’t work that way.”
Alexander talked his way in. “I made the case that the school was originally created for kids exactly like me.”