Show Them You Got Skills!

One of the takeaways from seeing the Harlem Globetrotters is while its a fun show, the audience is definitely aware that everyone on the basketball court is very skilled! Before the game started one of the Globetrotters (Moose, I think) was nailing baskets from half court with one hand and his back to the hoop!

How does that relate to performing magic?

Simple, in my opinion the audience must know you are skilled at what you do. I guess you don’t need an overt display of skill like a manipulation act, but something that shows you’re not just doing push button magic.

How do you do that in magic? There are a lot of ways, many years ago when I went to Caesar’s Magical Empire in Las Vegas the stage show as done by The Pendragons. One of the things that he did was sat on the edge of the stage and did a torn and restored cigarette paper. It stood out because The Pendragon’s show is soo big, then he does a little bit with a tiny piece of paper. That routine just used his hands and the cigarette paper and showed that he can do sleight of hand.

Whatever you do to show skill doesn’t have to overtly look like you have skill like producing cards from backpalm, but the audience needs to know you have skill.

-Louie

Chop Cup Load…

Sometimes I think younger magicians don’t give old timers enough credit. The other night I was at a magic club meeting over Zoom and we got talking about chop cup. One of the older members showed us a really cool loading technique that I had never seen before. He used to use it when he did magic behind a bar. The best way to describe it was it was like the Sylvester Pitch done into the cup. It was a really great way to load the cup!

I remember being a kid and while I’ve always loved hearing old magicians talk, many times their moves aren’t very good. It’s not that they aren’t good, they’re just older techniques that have been replaced by better methods. It’s easy to have this cloud your judgement and quickly dismiss what they are doing or talking about.

An example of this is when I was a teenager, I could produce single cards from a back palmed stock in the modern way where you keep the stack behind your hand and peel off a single card. I remember talking about back palming with Mickey Hades and him telling me I was doing it wrong. He taught me to do it the old way of moving the whole stock to the front, peeling off a single card, and then reback palming the stock of cards. It’s a way less efficient way of doing it compared to the more modern way. I can still do it that way (not very well anymore), but more importantly it gave me time to chat with Mickey and that was fun!

If you’re a younger magician, or even an older one, don’t immediately dismiss a magician just because they are older.