I’m was home for a day and in the mail that had been accumulating was a book called Bingo Bango by Jeff Stone. It’s a book about the classic practical joke item that makes a loud bang and surprises people.
The book is a fun read and has over 100 things you can do with the Bingo Device. There are jokes, magic tricks, gags and more.
What surprise me was that apparently at some point I had helped Jeff figure out some of the history of the is joke. I know a bit about about, when I used to work at Market Magic Shop in Seattle, I sold a ton of them. They came in many different forms, sometimes hidden in books, or pens, or even on that is held on your hand like a joy buzzer.
It was very sweet of Jeff to send me a book, and he wrote me a nice note as well:
This is a fun book, and if you’re into practical jokes it’s great! Another fun thing about this book is to see how brainstorming on one idea can lead to soo many different ideas!
A couple days ago I wrote about an idea I had for a method for the invisible deck, but had a kicker where the card had a different colored back and then the rest of the cards were blank. This was inspired by Vernet Magic’s 52 B’Wave card trick.
I’ve been doing it at the fair I’m performing at, and I took a quick video of the first time I did it:
There’s a couple things I need to work on. The load to the deck in my pocket is very clunky. Right now I’m trying to square up the card with the back of the deck. I don’t think I need to do that. I think I just need to get it fairly close the the deck, and then can align it as I’m pulling it from the pocket.
People seem to react to the three beats of the trick. I wish I could come up with a one deck way to do it with jumbo cards. As it is right now, if I was doing it in a big room, I’d need video projection for it to play big.
At the end of the day yesterday, I mentioned to my contact in the event production that having all tables up front isn’t really conducive to doing a show. It may work for more ambient things like music, but not for an interactive show that people need to pay attention to. I also mentioned the giant speakers on stage, and how the took out usable performing area. Their 16 foot wide stage, only had 8 feet of usable space. I think showing them this picture of a band on that stage helped get my point across:
The poor keyboard player was buried in the behind the speaker. I was told the the speakers wouldn’t move, and I’ll need to figure out how to work around them. In a compromise, if I figured out how to do my show with the speakers onstage, they would give me some benches up front and take out the front two tables.
To my surprise, this is what I walked into this morning:
The benches made a world of difference! It gives me a place for my anchor crowd to sit. Once I have that group, I can win over the people with their backs to me at the tables…or I can walk those people as they’ll realize that sitting and chatting at the tables isn’t easy during my show. Once I walk the people that don’t want to watch my show, I can fill the space with people who do.
I’m hoping that people will see that I was right about the benches and maybe think my idea with moving the speakers (somehow) has some merit. I’ll revisit that conversation with production later in the week.
Sometimes you get to a gig and you realize you are going to work. When I got to this show to load in and saw the stage, I knew it was going to be a long run! Here’s the view of the stage from the front:
The stage is probably 12 feet wide and 16 feet deep. Then about 7 or 8 feet of the front of the stage is taken up by the speakers. Then the monitors make it impossible to play close to the edge of the stage for maximum visibility. The monitors will force me to play back, and the problem with that is that is the now the tall speakers become visual obstructions for people trying to watch the show if they aren’t seated in the center of the audience.
Now let’s flip the view around and look at the audience from the stage:
The audience is seated at round tables. That’s horrible for a show. You’ll notice that the chairs closest to the stage actually are facing away the from the stage. So the people with the best seats have their backs to me!
Some gigs I feel like my show is being set up to fail. My plan is to ask for more chairs to fill the front, then either ask for the speakers to be moved to the back of the stage, or do the show on the ground in front of the speakers. It’s going to piss off the sound guy, but it’s really the only option with what they’ve given me.
In the past I’ve played with using an invisible deck in my show. The issue I have with it, is that it’s a pretty standard trick. I want to layer it with having something more than just an upside down card. In the past I’ve come up with a method where you can have more than one card picked (no force) and they are all upside down. In my show right now I’m using a variation on Vernet Magic’s 52 B’wave.
The 52 B’wave effect is the named card is upside down, has a different colored back and all of the other cards are blank. I really like this effect, and I think a booker that has seen the invisible deck will be able to tell the difference. What I don’t like about it is that there is a force of the color of the card.
I was kicking around ideas for it, and I think I have come up with a method that I like better than Vernet’s 52 B’wave. Here’s how the effect will play, you show a deck of cards and hold half in each hand. The audience chooses a half to eliminate (no forces are used in this) and you put them on the table. You then split the remaining cards in and half chosen to eliminate and repeat this till you have one card. The elimination process happens with the faces of the cards to the audience. You then reach into your pocket and remove a deck of cards. Inside that deck is one face up card, it matches the one selected by the audience. The card is not only the only card face up, but it has a different colored back, and the rest of the deck is blank! Not that I would do this, but at the end of the trick, the deck is ungimmicked and could be examined.
OK, for method it’s a combination of a gimmick, and sleight of hand. I haven’t tried this yet, but I’ll going to give it a go during my preshow at the fair tomorrow!
I just added a new cage to my vanishing birdcage collection.
This is a Thayer Vanishing Birdcage and is the non-rigid style cage. For some reason, I thought that Abbotts was the only one that made a non-rigid vanishing birdcage. I don’t know who made them first, however based on the timelines of the two companies, I think Thayer made them before Abbotts, however someone could have made them before both.
This cage is a bridge between the older metal rigid cages and the semi rigid cages, like the Lindhurst cage. This is rectangular and has the fixed perch, where the abbots which I think came after was square and eliminated the fixed perch. I think then the Lindurst style cage grew from the Abbott’s cage.
Another neat thing about the Thayer vanishing birdcage is how the pull is connected to the cage:
It’s permanently attached to the cage, and not clipped on. The red ribbon extends down the cage onto the pull. This in theory smooths out the cage going up the sleeve and eliminates some possible snag points. Having a clip like a modern cage adds places for the cage to snag.
I’m glad to add this to my collection, as I think it’s a missing link from the older style cage to the more modern cages.
The Moisture Festival Podcast continues their residency in Berkeley California where they are joined by the hilarious Dan Holzman. You may know Dan as one half of the juggling team the Raspyni Brothers and we discuss his performing career that has spanned over three decades.
We hear about his time performing on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, opening for Robin Williams and his weird interaction with Ronald Reagan. We learn about his successes and failures as a skill toy inventor, the books he has written and how he keeps focused on so many different projects. We were super excited to talk to Dan and we know you will enjoy it as much as we did.
A few of the Seattle area magicians got together for a little magic jam before a baseball game. We were playing around with some forks and I realized you could do this with them:
This is essentially the multiplying banana move that’s done with sponge bananas, however I’m doing it with plastic forks. Normally you can’t fold a plastic fork in half, however I learned that the compostable forks you can, and they will pop back into their original straight shape.
I’m doing the thing more like Percy Abbott’s Perpetual Balls, than the banana effect. The main difference is the moment of the production. If I’m remembering right, in the banana effect you take away a banana and the next one is instantly there. With the Perpetual Balls there’s a pause before the production.
Over the weekend I performed at a busker’s festival, and shared the stage (aka bank parking lot) with Hillia Hula. She does a hula hoop show.
Hillia has great costuming and is very likable onstage. Being likeable is 90% of the game. Personally, in my show I’m a slow burn, you really don’t like me until about 10 minutes into the show.
As for the tricks, they are pretty standard hoop tricks, and she does them well. There was nothing in the show that I hadn’t seen before. If she had a couple of original routines, I think she’d really blow up.
In hooping, I don’t think there’s a lot of innovation in new tricks that I’ve seen. Pretty much every does a very similar show. Dizzy Hips is the only act I’ve seen that has a couple of original (as far as I know) hula hoop tricks. I will say my knowledge of hula hoop tricks is very limited, so Hillia may be doing some original stuff that to my untrained eye looks like something I’ve seen before.
If you get a chance to see Hillia’s show, check it out, it’s a solid street show. You can learn a lot by watching it.
The picture below is from back in 2017, I had an idea to use a foam hand for a trick.
The idea was inspired by a math based trick in a Jim Steinmeyer book. The problem I faced in the trick was giving clear instructions. I tabled the trick shortly after I started doing it in 2017. Then shortly before the pandemic hit in 2020, I reread in Gary Oulette‘s book of his columns in Genii magazine called Fulminations about the challenges David Copperfield had to get through when giving instructions for his “touch the TV screen” tricks. The instructions had to be clear, even for the biggest idiot.
Then the pandemic hit and I started playing with some tricks that used counting on a hand, and went out and remade my foam hand. I never used the foam hand in a show, because in a virtual show my hand plays big.
Right now I’m cleaning up and downsizing the props I have, and I came across the giant foam hand. It’s sort of gimmicked, or at least altered so that I can bend the fingers down and they stay down. In a couple of days I head to Arizona for a month long gig and I think I’m going to take the hand with me and try to figure out the routine.
One thing I think it lacked was an ending. It needs a good way to reveal that they are all touching the same finger. When I made the last foam hand, I also bought a foam hand that just has the pointer finger up. The challenge was how to reveal this. I was playing with it and essentially found a pull the giant hand off my hand to reveal my hand is holding a giant foam hand with just the index finger up!
Now I have a moment to punctuate the reveal of everyone on the same finger.
It’s still got a challenge. Am I going to do the trick looking at the audience or not? Traditionally in this type of trick you don’t look at the audience, however I’m not sure I want to do that. You lose a lot of control by not looking AND you can’t keep an eye on people doing the procedure.
I think I can solve this by having my instructions fixed. By “fixed” I mean something that I can’t change. It could be a recording, like in the Banana Bandana style of trick. I really don’t like performing to a recorded track, it takes away a lot of what makes a live show fun. I think I may make a flap card, that has a five on one side. You turn it over and it has a three on the back side. Then when you turn it over again, the five has changed to a one. That gives the audience something interesting during the boring counting procedure. I also think going from five to three to one, makes the counting easier as it’s getting simpler each time.
I’ll have some playing to do, but luckily I’ll have a monthlong venue to try them out!
