New Jersey Magician and Mentalist for Hire
Union League National booked him for the Fourth of July in 2024, then signed him for 2026.
Check availability for your New Jersey date → Send the date, the venue and the headcount, and you get a straight answer on format and availability.
On 6 July 2024, Gentry spent an evening at Union League National Golf Club, 1765 US 9 North in Swainton, Cape May County, working close-range mentalism through eight hundred guests at the club's Independence Day weekend celebration. Upscale casual. Three generations inside most of the family groups. A separate children's entertainer running the younger half of the event alongside him. The club has him under signed contract to do the same thing again on 5 July 2026.
The second date is the part worth reading twice. A club's Fourth of July weekend is the one event on its calendar that every member attends and every member has an opinion about afterwards. Nobody gambles that weekend on a performer they are unsure of, and nobody signs a contract two years out for an evening that went politely. The booking came back because the first one worked in front of the people whose opinion the club's staff has to live with all season. Testimonials are generous. A repeat contract costs the person who writes it something.
Union League National is a Union League of Philadelphia property, and the golf club itself sits in Cape May County, which is a fair description of how Gentry's New Jersey work runs in general: Philadelphia roots, New Jersey rooms. The record goes north too. He worked the Paper Mill Playhouse and its Carriage House in Millburn across multiple dates in 2024, and the NJ Convention & Expo Center in October 2021. Stockton University booked a performance and then booked a second, separate session on critical thinking built on what the audience had just watched.
New Jersey rooms Gentry has worked
Union League National Golf Club — 1765 US 9 North, Swainton, Cape May County. 6 July 2024, and again 5 July 2026. Walk-around mentalism for eight hundred guests across a holiday weekend party, upscale casual, with a children's entertainer working the same event on a separate track. An event of that shape defeats most of what gets booked for it. Guests do not arrive together, do not sit down, and are never all facing the same direction. Half of them are talking to somebody they have not seen since last summer. What holds a crowd like that is work delivered at conversational range, in pockets of six or eight, then moving on before anyone has to be asked to stay. A guest who came through the door at nine got the same evening as the family who arrived at six.
What a returning booking tells a planner. A club's summer signature event carries the general manager's name, and members hosting their own guests have their own standing quietly in play. Under those conditions the requirement is that every person who takes part comes out of it looking better than they went in. That is the design principle the work is built on, and the reason the same club put the same performer in front of the same families two years later.
Paper Mill Playhouse and the Carriage House — Millburn, Essex County. Multiple dates, 2024. North Jersey, and a different test entirely. Paper Mill is one of the most established theatres in the state, and its hospitality spaces put the work in front of people who spend their leisure time watching trained performers do difficult things well. That crowd knows what timing is, and knows the difference between a room being managed and a room being played to.
NJ Convention & Expo Center — October 2021. The state's exhibition calendar runs through halls of this kind, and they are unforgiving in a specific way: an enormous ceiling, no acoustic help, and an audience walking past rather than sitting still. Attention on a floor like that goes to whatever other people have already stopped for.
Stockton University. A performance, and then a separate critical-thinking session drawn from what the audience had just seen. The university put the material in front of students twice — once to be experienced, once to be pulled apart by people being trained to pull things apart. Useful to carry into a conversation with a learning-and-development team, or any program committee that needs the afternoon to produce something.
Atlantic City. The casino properties, the Convention Center and the private evening built around a convention week are their own market with their own logic, and they are covered on the Atlantic City page.
What corporate entertainment in New Jersey has to do
New Jersey is the densest corporate corridor in the country, and almost none of it behaves like a single market. The state runs on two orbits. One faces New York and one faces Philadelphia, and a planner in Paramus and a planner in Moorestown are effectively working in different cities that happen to share a governor. Most performers belong to one orbit and visit the other. Gentry is ordinary in both: Philadelphia is his home market and twenty minutes from the Camden County line, and the New York side of the state is a routine drive rather than a trip.
The heaviest concentration of corporate event spend in the state sits in the pharmaceutical and life sciences belt — Princeton up through Middlesex, Somerset and Morris. Research organizations, device manufacturers, contract labs, the commercial teams attached to them. Their events are sales meetings, cycle meetings, launch dinners, long-service recognitions and holiday parties, and the audience is unusual. These are people employed to establish whether something is true and to say so on the record with their name attached, and they do not switch that off at a cocktail hour. Give them a performance that names what it is and then does something they cannot account for anyway, and they will follow it further than almost any other audience in the country. Skepticism is not resistance. It is attention with the safety off.
North of that, the financial services and headquarters belt across Bergen, Hudson and Essex runs on a different clock. Asset managers, insurers, banking operations, the New Jersey-side offices of firms whose names are on Manhattan buildings. Their evenings are client-appreciation nights, award dinners for producers and December parties in ballrooms and private dining rooms along the Hudson waterfront and the Route 17 and Route 3 corridors. The expectation there is set by what those clients have already been given across the river, which means the bar is not a local one.
South and west, the Cherry Hill, Mount Laurel and Camden County office corridor is functionally a Philadelphia suburb with a different tax code. Insurance brokerages, health systems, advisory firms, law practices, logistics operators strung along 295 and Route 73. Their events run forty to two hundred guests in a hotel ballroom or a restaurant's private room, and the cocktail hour is usually the actual event while the dinner is the excuse that got everyone to commit to a date.
Then there are the clubs, their own season entirely. Country clubs inland and shore clubs down the coast run member calendars that peak in summer and again in December, and club events are family events in a way corporate events are not. Members bring children, grandchildren and houseguests; ages run six to eighty in the same tent. That is a crowd which cannot be seated and should not be asked to be.
Across all four worlds the event types repeat: corporate holiday parties, sales meetings and kickoffs, client-appreciation nights, award dinners, milestone celebrations, family days. What varies is the room, the hour, and how much of the audience is free to be somewhere else.
The formats
Walk-around mentalism. Priced by the hour. Gentry works through the crowd in groups of three to twelve, gives each one a few minutes, and moves. This is the format for a club lawn, a family day, a hospitality tent, a launch reception and the cocktail hour that is secretly the whole party. It absorbs uneven arrivals, outdoor space and noise, and needs no stage, no sound and no gap in the run of show. It was the format for eight hundred guests at Union League National, and it scales by hours on the floor rather than by headcount.
Stand-up mentalism. Forty-five to sixty minutes, a performance area, a microphone and volunteers who come up out of the audience. This is the right answer for the seated half of a New Jersey evening: an award dinner for a sales force, a long-service recognition night, a chapter meeting, a distributor banquet, the after-dinner block at a December party. The show has played to rooms of five people and to rooms of thousands, and the material does not change shape between them.
Keynote. Forty-five to sixty minutes, built on his TEDx talk Faking It IS Making It — how persuasion gets assembled, how confidence gets manufactured, and why the distance between competence and the appearance of competence is shorter than most rooms want to believe. Demonstration carries the argument rather than slides. For a pharma commercial kickoff or a financial services national sales meeting, it gives a program committee a session that earns its agenda slot and still sends people to lunch talking. See keynote speaking.
Combination evening. Walk-around through the reception, a seated set after dinner. The floor work builds appetite for the stage, and the stage work pays off what people saw at arm's length two hours earlier, by which point the volunteer standing up has half the room invested in how they do. For a holiday party or an award dinner running past three hours in a venue with both a foyer and a ballroom, this is the strongest shape on offer.
Trade show booth activation. For exhibition halls and the state's association and industry shows. Gentry works the aisle in scheduled pulls, gathers a group around something they want to see the end of, holds them, and hands your team people who stopped because they wanted to. See trade show presentations and booth activation.
Performance plus session. The pairing Stockton University booked: the performance first, then a separate working session on critical thinking built from what the room had just experienced. Built for university programs, leadership cohorts and corporate learning days — and a natural fit for research-heavy organizations, where the second half is genuinely about how conclusions get reached.
Venues and events this is built for
Country clubs and shore clubs — member days, family days and holiday weekend parties, walk-around across a lawn, a tent and a terrace, as at Union League National in Swainton.
Pharmaceutical and life sciences campuses, Princeton through Morris County — launch dinners, cycle meetings and recognition evenings for commercial and research teams.
Hotel ballrooms along the Route 17, Route 3 and Hudson waterfront corridors — December parties and award dinners for North Jersey financial services and headquarters staff.
Cherry Hill, Mount Laurel and Camden County ballrooms and private dining rooms — forty to two hundred guests, cocktail hour into a seated program.
Theatre and performing arts hospitality spaces — donor receptions, opening nights and member events, as at the Paper Mill Playhouse Carriage House in Millburn.
Exhibition halls and convention space — booth activation during show hours and walk-around at sponsor receptions, as at the NJ Convention & Expo Center.
University and college event spaces — a performance, or the performance-plus-session pairing run at Stockton University.
Corporate offices and campus common areas — family days, summer picnics, anniversary celebrations and the holiday event held on site.
Nonprofit galas and fundraisers — walk-around through a silent auction, when the job is keeping guests standing near the bid sheets.
Why the room takes it seriously
He is a mentalist, and he says so plainly. The work is performance — built on rhetoric, close observation and a career spent reading rooms — and in front of an audience that evaluates claims for a living, that plainness is what gets him taken seriously by people whose profession is checking whether things are true.
MA in Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon. BA in Philosophy. He taught at Carnegie Mellon, Temple, Duquesne and the University of Pittsburgh, which amounts to years of standing in front of rooms with every reason not to listen and learning what changes that. His TEDx talk is Faking It IS Making It. He served in the Peace Corps in Ghana and taught in Japan through the JET Programme, two long stretches spent reading rooms he did not share a language with, and he has performed in dozens of countries since. Clients include NBC, TEDx, FOX, CBS, MassMutual, AWS and DuPont.
The principle underneath all of it is that the audience is a collaborator. Nothing is done to the room; it is done with the room. The person who stands up finishes the exchange as the most impressive figure in it, in front of colleagues they will see on Monday, which is why the next person wants to be chosen — and why a research director or a regional sales head will volunteer in front of their own team without calculating the risk first. That decision is what makes the work safe to put in front of an audience whose good opinion you need to keep.
Blow Their Minds (Without Insulting Their Intelligence).
Client reviews
Joe Mallee, CEO, MassMutual of Eastern PA.
Maybar Durst, TeamUp.
Alison Reeley, Nurture Marketing.
Bruce White.
Chief executives, event producers, and the marketers who justified the line item afterwards. Full comments on the testimonials page.
Questions planners ask
We have people in North Jersey and people in South Jersey. Does he cover the whole state?
Yes, and the record shows it — Millburn in Essex County across multiple dates in 2024, Swainton in Cape May County on a recurring annual contract, plus convention and university work in between. The New York-facing half of New Jersey and the Philadelphia-facing half are genuinely different markets, and he is a regular in both rather than a visitor to one.
Gentry is based in Philadelphia. Does a North Jersey date carry anything extra?
Travel and accommodation are never billed separately. The fee is all-inclusive: one number, agreed before anything is signed, and every proposal comes back itemized so the number is legible line by line.
Our event is a family day on a lawn in July. What does that actually look like?
That is the Union League National model, and it is one of the formats this work is strongest in. He moves through the crowd in small groups for a set number of hours, handling adults and mixed family groups, while a children's entertainer runs the younger end of the event on a separate track — which is exactly how the Swainton event is structured. The material is clean throughout and plays across the age range, so nobody has to be steered away from anything.
Our audience is scientific and technical. Will this land with them?
That audience is the best one this work gets. People trained to test claims give a performance their full attention rather than their patience, and the evening never asks them to accept anything on faith. Stockton University booked the show and then booked a separate critical-thinking session built on it, which is the clearest evidence available that the material holds up when an analytical room takes it apart afterwards.
Our December party does not have a venue yet. When should we send the date?
Now, before the venue and the run of show are settled. October through December fills first, with May and June close behind, and a club's holiday weekend can be committed a long way out. Short notice is always worth asking about — stepping into an event late is a regular part of this work, and dates that come together quickly are normal rather than exceptional.
What does the venue usually need to provide?
For walk-around, nothing at all: he works the room, the tent or the lawn exactly as it stands. For a stand-up set or a keynote, the typical setup is roughly a six-by-eight-foot performance area, a wireless mic input, decent light on the performer and access to set up before doors. A full technical rider ships with every contract, and liability insurance is carried, with a certificate going to the venue on request.
We run the same event every year. Can we lock him in annually?
Yes, and it is one of the more common arrangements here. Union League National has him on contract for its Fourth of July weekend across separate years, and Paper Mill Playhouse ran multiple dates inside a single season. Recurring dates get set early and the material is refreshed so that guests who were in the room last year are seeing something new this year.
Book a New Jersey date
Send the date, the venue, the headcount and what the event is supposed to accomplish — holding eight hundred people on a club lawn through a holiday afternoon, giving a commercial team something they will still be arguing about at lunch, or making a December ballroom feel like an evening rather than an obligation. You get a straight answer on format, a real number, and no conversation later about what the number covers.