For one night in October, the oldest private college in Texas will hand its oldest auditorium over to a magician from down the road. Rudy Reynoso, who calls Sherman home and credits the city with helping him find his passion for performing, brings a one-time-only lecture and magic show to Hoxie Thompson Auditorium in Sherman Hall on the Austin College campus on Friday, October 23, from 7 to 8 p.m. Doors open at 6. Tickets are free, but they are limited to four per person, which is the sort of cap that tells you the room is not enormous and the organizers expect it to fill.
That room is part of the draw. Hoxie Thompson Auditorium sits inside Sherman Hall, the red-brick landmark at the center of a campus founded in 1849 by a Princeton-educated Presbyterian missionary named Daniel Baker. Austin College was chartered that November by Texas Governor George Wood, modeled on the charters of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and it still operates under that original charter today, making it the oldest institution of higher education in Texas still running under its original name and charter. The college opened in Huntsville, admitted its first class in the fall of 1850, and counted Sam Houston and Anson Jones, two presidents of the Republic of Texas, on its original board of trustees. Yellow fever epidemics, the Civil War, and hard economic times eventually pushed the school to Sherman.
The auditorium itself has shrunk with the decades. According to the college's own history, Hoxie Thompson once held around 1,000 people; its large balcony was closed and renovated into offices in the 1960s, and the space now seats 157. The college notes that the auditorium has welcomed some prestigious guests over the years. On this particular Friday, the guest is a hometown one.
Reynoso's story starts small and local. He has said his journey began when he was young and performed a magic show with his father for their family. In December 2025 he came back to Sherman for a Christmas show at the historic Kidd-Key Auditorium, marking 26 years since he first discovered magic in the city, and he described that performance as a love letter to Sherman and to the art of magic. He told KXII that the evening was super special to him, and that he wanted it to be a gift to Sherman to show his love and the true magic that Sherman has in his life. The show featured disappearing cards and reappearing bouncy balls, and the audience, in the station's telling, was wowed.
What he asked the crowd to take home was not a trick. The sense of belief, he said. I want people to believe again in their dreams and in other people. He was also candid about the cost of the craft. I've failed so much, he told KXII. Magic, more than any other art form, puts you face to face with failure, rejection, and that need to keep improving skill wise.
The failures evidently did not stick. Reynoso now bills himself as a corporate magician and mentalist and says he has been hired again and again for more than 25 years. His client list includes Kendra Scott, whose founder called a performance amazing and mesmerizing, and the Zac Brown Band; he has also worked with the Grammys and HBO, and he turned up on a livestream by the streamer IShowSpeed. He performs a signature live magic show every weekend in Austin's Historic Rainey Street District and travels for private events, weddings, and speaking engagements.
The lecture half of the October program is not a novelty bolted onto the tricks. Reynoso has built a talk he calls The Magician's Mindset, which he has described as a psychological exploration into the art of deception. In a 2024 workshop at the University of Texas at Austin's Moody Center events calendar, he pitched it as a rare look at magic from the magician's point of view, letting the audience in on how to think like a magician and recognize the gaps in logic and sensory perception that allow wonder and awe to flourish. The session used magic and mentalism as a foundation for diving into rhetoric, psychology, misdirection, and evolutionary behavior, with participants learning how the mechanics of misdirection exploit ordinary tendencies and why silence and suspense carry so much weight in a performance. It is the kind of material that fits comfortably in a college hall.
His ties to North Texas run deep. Reynoso is a 2014 graduate of the University of North Texas, where, as a first-generation college student, he served as the first Latino student body president and as a student regent. He also produces a charted soccer podcast, The Give N Go, with his brother, another UNT alumnus.
All of which makes the Austin College date something of a homecoming with a lecture attached. Sherman is where the tricks started, in a family living room with his father; Sherman is where he came back to mark 26 years of them; and Sherman is where, on an October Friday, he will stand in a 157-seat auditorium on a campus older than the state's public university system and try to explain, and then demonstrate, why your eyes lie to you. The doors open an hour early. The tickets cost nothing. The only catch is that there are four to a person, and the room is small.