The last week I’ve been working on a thumb tie using electrical tape. The routine is starting to figure itself out, but I keep noticing dead spots or spots where the blocking is rough and hard for the audience to see.
One place in the routine that’s both dead time and not really audience viewing friendly is when the guy on stage cuts the tape off my fingers. About half the time they try to cut into the gimmick, which obviously is no good. Then I also have to make sure they don’t cut my thumb! While the whole process probably takes 5-10 seconds, it’s a hot mess onstage.
My solution has been to hand the guy the scissors, then take them back, but with my now free hand and cut the tape off my left hand. It gets a laugh at the surprise of my hand being free! I can cut the tape off my thumb really quickly and while facing the audience.
I think this is the solution!
-Louie
Category: Tricks
Thumb Tie and the Linking Safety Pins
The last couple of days I’ve been working on using a giant set of safety pins onstage for a linking pin routine. Recently I started adding a thumb tie to it to add length. One thing I quickly learned is that there’s a ton of dead time at the end of the routine when I’m having the tape cut off of my thumbs.
My first attempt for fixing the dead time was to add a trick to the end. What I was doing was taking the tape and turning it into an animal balloon. That went over fine, but it’s not the right fix for the routine.
I think my second attempt is a reasonable solution to making the dead time of cutting the tape off my fingers worth it. I’m moving the thumb tie to the first half of the trick. After the thumb tie, the tape is cut off, then I move into the linking pins routine. This has been playing a lot better!
Now I need to keep adding meat to the routine to get it good.
-Louie
Strange Magic Prop in Real Life!
I was browsing through reddit and came across a post with an picture of an old bread slicer:
I immediately made a connection to a prop that I assumed was simply a strange magic prop. The bread slicer resembles Lester Lake’s Disceto that was put out by Abbott’s Magic!
A quick internet search shows that bread slicing machines were invented in the 1910’s and Disecto was put out in 1942. It’s entirely possibly that the Disecto was trying to mimic a common object.
Crazy.
It’s also interesting that if it’s supposed to be a bread slicer, that people still use a prop that mimics something that used to be something people were familiar with, but hasn’t been common in my lifetime.
This is why it’s important to look at our props or lines and take out things that people aren’t familiar with. A good example of this is when I hear a comedy magician use a line about someone’s picture in the post office. That’s something that really hasn’t existed in my lifetime. I’ve encountered it once in my life about 10 years ago in a small town. I do know the reference from Bugs Bunny cartoons, but those were made decades before I was born. Because of this I don’t find the “post office joke” funny or something I can relate to. Look at your show and remove old references whether they are verbal or physical objects.
-Louie
Expanding the Stage Linking Pins
This week I started working on routine using some giant safety pins that I came across (read about them here). My initial plan was to see if I could make my close up linking pins routine work on stage with the the giant pins which are about 14 inches long.
The routine works onstage, but it needs more. It’s hard to justify the time it takes to bring someone onstage for a quick trick. I needed to build out the routine and add more.
I think that adding a thumb tie to the trick adds time and texture to the trick. The idea is after my normal linking pin routine, I would add the thumb tie using the giant pins as the “ring” that would normally go on and off my arms.
I’m thinking of using electrical tape for the tie as it’s easy to get almost anywhere. Method wise I’m thinking of using Irv Weiner’s Red Tape thumb tie, as I have all the stuff for it.
We’ll see how it plays onstage…
-Louie
Linking Pins on Stage
In my close up set I do the linking safety pins and I love the trick. I’ve even gimmicked a larger set of about 5 inch pins to do the trick with. The 5 inch pins are good for about 30 people, there’s too small for a real stage show.
I found these giant safety pins and I think they’d be great for using on stage!
The challenge now is figuring out context to do them and getting more than a couple of minutes out of them. In my close up routine I use someone from the audience. Since I’m bringing someone onstage I really need to get at least 4-5 minutes out of the routine to make it worth the time it takes to get someone onstage.
In my writing this morning I had the idea of combining the linking pins with the thumb tie. The idea is the beginning phases will be my normal linking pin routine, then I’ll have my thumbs tied to “eliminate sleight of hand” and then the pins will end up going on and off my arms. That’s the idea, we’ll see how it plays when I get a chance to try it out!
-Louie
Doing a Bar Gig
I don’t do a lot of bar gigs anymore, I’m not opposed to them, but they don’t normally make sense with my schedule. Last week I headlined a comedy show at a speakeasy. It was a fun gig!
One of the skills you need for these gigs is to be able to follow any act. The act before me was a comic that was fairly blue, and I do a “TV clean” show, so there’s contrast and the audience has to shift mental gears from his style to mine. There’s nothing wrong with what he was doing, that’s his art. When there’s contrast like that, you need to come onstage with confidence, you’re bringing the audience into your world.
Before the show I always try to do some close up magic, that will have people in the audience already on your side!
The “green room” was in a back corner of the bar and the cool thing was I could watch the show on the TV!
Also I don’t normally have merch to sell at bar gigs, but I took some of my faux children’s books C is for Conspiracy: The ABC’s of Conspiracy Theories and pitched them from the stage.
They sold well after the show, so that was a bonus!!
Bar gigs have a lot of challenges, like sight lines, rowdy crowds, challenging stages, however I find them very rewarding as a performer. Because they are typically smaller venues you can connect with people a lot more than in a larger venue.
-Louie
The Unconquered Card!
When I was a teenager I had bought The Unconquered Card by Mike Rogers. This is a three card monte routine that’s similar to Michael Skinner‘s three card monte routine, and there’s some debate as to who was doing it first. The cards for the routine are long gone, but recently I came across the book with the set of cards that was pretty beat up.
The cards were unusable, however I have a few decks of FAKO Cards and other packs that are full of different gaffs. I was able to find the needed cards for the trick!
I’m having fun relearning the trick and I think that I’m going to record a couple of phases and use it in my preshow video.
-Louie
Four Ace Routine
When I was a teenager I put together a four ace routine that I did all the time. I haven’t really done it in probably a decade, but did it the other day and now it’s creeping into my close up set.
There’s not much to the routine, here’s the flow:
1: Deck is shuffled by the spectator and I cut to the four aces
2: The aces are put in the middle and appear on top of the deck
3: The aces are put into the middle of the deck and the deck is given to the spectator. They shake the deck and the four aces jump out.
It’s a nice little three effect trick with a fun, interactive ending. It’s a good trick to have in my brain to use whenever I need to fill a couple of extra minutes when doing close up magic.
I think you should always have some back up material that you can do with the props you already are carrying. I have my main close up set of material, but I have a ton of things that I can do with a regular deck at a moments notice.
-Louie
It’s the Little Things in Videos
While I was working on my promo video, a video of a magician came across my feed. The trick is fine, but there’s a few things about the video that should have been addressed. Here’s the video:
I’m assuming you noticed the fake audio reaction in the video. They never sound quite right and they way most people use them, they’re never proportional to what they’re doing. It’s always too much.
The other thing you may not have noticed was the guy on the left standing on stage like some sort of body guard. At about the 18 – 20 second mark his face pops into frame. The “audience” is going nuts and he looks bored as hell.
Why is that guy even in the video?
Cropping him out would be a super easy job. As long as you’re in there adding audio tracks, might as well crop him out. It’s the small things that you need to notice in the videos you make. I always try to crop out people who look uninterested or people in the background. It’s not always possible, but you gotta try!
-Louie
New 2024 Promo Video
Way back in about January of 2020 I added a task to my To Do List, and that was to remake my promo video as it was about two years old at that point. It was a low priority item, so I didn’t immediately get to work on it. Then the whole “2020 thing” went down and making a stage magic promo video became super low priority!
Well, four years later I finally got around to making a new promo video for my stage magic show.
This one took me about a 20 + hours to make. Most of that time wasn’t the actual editing, but going through 6 years of video to find the videos that I wanted to pull clips from. It’s pretty easy to know right off the bat if a video is useable based on the background and general video quality. That removes about 60%-70% of videos right way, but it’s still a time consuming process!
The other super time consuming thing is watching the final video over and over again to notice small things, correcting them and then making a new final video. Then repeating that until I’m at final video version 12 or so. There is a point when you just need to be done with the video and barring something crazy you didn’t realize, it’s time to put it out into the world!
I’m glad I finally did it and can remove it from my To Do List!
-Louie