Tonight is Magic Rob’s mom’s opening reception for her art exhibit, Iran: Images From Beneath A Chador.For those of you who don’t know, Magic Rob is a loyal customer of Proletariat and a friend of the shop. You’ve probably seen him in Harvard Square doing magic tricks and picking up all the single ladies…or maybe at last year’s denim release.

Now you don’t just earn the name Magic Rob – you’re given it. And it could only be given to him by someone way more gangster than he – his mom. Read her bio and then feel bad about how you are wasting away playing X-box (I know I am).

In 1979, when Randy Hope Goodman was 24 years old and a recent graduate in sociology from Boston University, a group of Iranian college students (no older than she) forcibly took control of the American Embassy in Tehran, taking Americans hostage. Three months into the “hostage crisis”, Goodman found herself in Iran as the photographer for a grassroots delegation of Americans invited by the Iranian students holding the hostages. The purpose of that delegation visit was to learn firsthand why the embassy was stormed.

This exhibit combines photographs taken during that first visit in 1980, with those from two subsequent visits. In ’81, she and two colleagues were contracted by CBS-TV News to gather video and were the sole US media credentialed in Iran. Returning in ’83 for Time magazine, she toured the Iran-Iraq war zone and had the exclusive opportunity to photograph Ayatollah Khomeini. Her moving photographs capture the spirit of those swept up in the wake of these momentous events: wives and fathers, soldiers and civilians, people whose lives were irrevocably changed by revolution, war and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Multicultural Arts Center, 41 2nd Street in Cambridge (Green line to Lechmere/walk 1 1/2 blocks.)