magic show tips – Page 92

Working in a gag…

Last week while performing at the fair, I was doing a trick I thought of about six months ago, but do to the pandemic, I didn’t really get a chance to do in person. The trick uses a gag card that I thought of. The gag is you offer them a “free pitcher of beer” but it’s really a “free picture of beer”.

You can read a bit more about the gag at:
http://www.magicshow.tips/magic-show-tips/free-beer/
and
http://www.magicshow.tips/magic-show-tips/adding-a-line/

There’s really nothing new to the this aside from the gag. It’s the old out to lunch principle. For a very old method, it still works really well and is very deceptive!

I had a blast doing it last week, and look forward to doing it more in the future!

Magic Garage Sale…

I’m putting together a magic garage sale on July 11th! It’s a literal garage sale, so you have to show up in person for the deals. What’s left I may try to sell on facebook used magic groups, and a lot of it will probably just go to the dump.

There’s a lot of cool stuff, and I was just going through last night and putting prices on things. The garage sale prices are pretty cheap, there are a lot of deals to be had! If I end up listing stuff on the internet for sale, it will be more than the garage sale prices.

Here’s what I priced yesterday:

There’s a lot more! If you’re going to be in the Seattle area on 7/11/21, send me an email and I’ll give you the details!

Cheap Vanishing Birdcages…

People still shoot me notes asking questions about my Take Up Reel. One of the questions I get asked a lot is, “will it work with the vanishing birdcages from India?”

The answer is yes, here’s a video of me doing it with one of them:

Pretty much if you can vanish it with a traditional wrist to wrist birdcage pull, then you can vanish it with my take up reel!

The A.C.T. Card Trick…

Here’s the second video of me revising a packet trick that I got with a collection of magic that I acquired. Today’s trick is the A.C.T. (another card trick) by Bill Pryor.

Here’s a demo of the trick as written, then how I revised the trick:

The big problem with this packet trick is that the whole effect is a “kicker” without the initial ending. What I mean by that is that you start by asking someone to think of a card, but you never reveal it. You need the initial effect for a kicker to really work. I think at the end spectators will still be thinking, “what about the card I was thinking of?”

Also I don’t think the gags are strong enough to carry the trick past you never revealing the card they are thinking of.

Lecture Review…

During the Pandemic, I did many virtual lectures for magic clubs. I stumbled across a review of one in the Linking Ring magazine:

I really enjoyed doing these lectures. I would like to continue doing them, however moving forward with in person shows opening back up, I honestly don’t think that it would be possible to do them for a donation to the IBM or SAM endowment funds due to my performing schedule. I will keep doing in person lectures at conventions or as I travel and am in an area for the local club. It was nice to be able to give back a little bit!

Stinger Music

Today I was messing around with adding stinger music to trick that didn’t get the final reaction I wanted. Stinger music is a short, usually upbeat musical tag that’s used to punctuate the end of a trick. I was really surprised at the effect it had on the trick. It took the trick from a mild response (much less than I thought it deserved) to a good response.

The two places I put it, one in a magic trick and one in a mentalism trick worked out great. The mentalism trick was where I think it really needs it, the effect is there, but it lingers in the audience’s heads. I need something to snap it out of their heads, and this may be the way.

Now for me the trick is to make it make sense. I don’t want to just blast music at the end of the trick. I think there needs to be music leading up to the stinger. This isn’t much of a problem, I just need to find music with lyrics that I can talk over.

I’m hoping to add a little bit more theatrical / production elements to the show. I’m trying to “level up” my show a little bit.

Four Card Monte…

Recently I ended up with a collection of magic tricks and in that collection there were a bunch of packet tricks. Most weren’t very good, but that got me thinking about trying to improve them. The first one that I tried was called 4 Card Monte, and there are a lot of packet tricks with this title, so don’t judge them all by this one.

Here’s the effect as written in the instructions, then the effect reworked by me:

The trick as written is pretty bad, and doesn’t make much sense with the addition of a fifth card at the end. I think my version where there’s only four cards shown the whole time makes more sense. The addition of the kicker ending really adds a punctuation to the end.

One thing I think that’s important when you get a magic trick is to not discard because you don’t like the trick as written. Play with it and see if you can make it work!

Leaving My Show…

One thing that’s great about my show is that I can fly with it. However right now my show is in the trunk of my car at the airport in Sacramento, I flew home during a gap between gigs in California. This summer I’m driving to all of my shows, this is due to rental cars being expensive right now and all of the reports I’ve been seeing about people with rental car reservations being denied a car because the rental car company over booked and there are no cars to rent.

Leaving my show in my car always causes me a little bit of stress. When I left the car I locked up my show case:

In my street show I do a chain escape, so my case is locked to my suitcase and they are both locked to my car by about 75 feet of chain! What that means is that if someone wants to steal my case, they can, it’s just going to be a pain in the butt! It’s not a quick smash and grab.

This gives me a little bit of peace of mind leaving it in another state.

Final Virtual Show…

My final scheduled virtual magic show was yesterday at 9:30am…and it was for a group of middle school aged kids. I’m going to say that middle school age isn’t the ideal demographic for 9:30am. They had fun, and so did I!

This show had some problems which are why virtual shows stressed me out. The big one was my internet dropped about 2 mins from the start of the show. I was back in the zoom before the show started. it’s one of those things that had it happened 5 mins later, it would have been a bigger issue. Zoom also wasn’t recognizing my mic, so I had to use my laptop’s mic. That also wasn’t a huge deal, but it just adds to the stress of these gigs.

I ran this show solo, normally I have my daughter run the production on the show. It was fun, but I’m glad to be back to performing in person.

I had a great time learning to perform in a virtual venue, and I really loved creating magic for virtual shows. I’m not saying I will never do another virtual show, there are just no more on my calendar.

Final Virtual Show…

Today is the the day that I perform my final virtual magic show! I’m pretty excited that I’m back to doing in person shows, however going forward I will still do virtual shows if requested. In the last year and a half, I think I’ve figured it out at a workable level. My virtual show was decent, not crazy amazing, but passable.

The HUGE thing that I’m not going to miss going forward is setting up my studio. I don’t have a dedicated space to do virtual shows, so I had to build and tear down the studio every time I did the show. That made the effort to do the virtual show close to what it would be to drive to an in person show.

The other big headache is technology. I think that’s the thing that was the most stressful about these shows. The internet has mysterious dropped out during shows, or gotten laggy while I was performing. That part that’s completely out of my hands, but affects the perception of how good the show is caused me a lot of stress!

I’m hoping today’s show virtual show is uneventful!