With COVID restrictions loosening up, we were able to get in a little magic jam session!
One of the things that we were playing with was some little hats that I found that are being sold as novelty thumb warmers. We combined it with Jonathan Friedman’s Mr Smiley Face trick and here’s the result:
It’s a fun little trick. It’s not the best trick in the world, but a fun little thing.
Yesterday I wrote about some changes to the Luca Volpe’s Key of Fate routine that I’m making. I figured I should write out the effect:
I show lock that’s locked to a little case and four keys in a cup and only one will open the lock. There are also three colored notebooks and three matching colored spots on the floor.
Three people from the audience are invited onstage to play a game. Whoever’s key opens the lock will win one of the prizes written on one of the pages of one of the notebooks. Each person grabs one key and one notebook, leaving a single key on the table for me. They are to stand on the spot on the floor that matches their notebook’s color.
You flip the pages of the notebook for the first person to see what prize they are playing for. They end up picking 500 Pesos, but unfortunately their key doesn’t open the lock. The first person returns to their seat.
The second person selects the ice cream sundae from their notebook as a prize, but their key doesn’t open the lock. The second person returns to their seat.
The final person, who is standing on the blue spot selects a prize, which is a banana. When they try to open the lock, it opens! Inside the case is their prize, a banana!!! They can keep the banana and return to their seat in the audience.For the kicker, you show underside of the two spots from the people that didn’t win and there’s nothing under them. The spot of the person that won, has some paper taped to the bottom of their spot. It says, “Congratulations on winning the banana, sorry the other two people didn’t wind the ice cream sundae and the 500 Pesos!”
Ok, so that’s how the routine plays. I’m a huge fan of being able to describe what happens in the trick in a sentence. If I take those six paragraphs of how the routine plays and condense it into one sentence it would be:
The magician predicts the outcome of a game played with the audience.
That’s the effect, it’s a prediction of the outcome of a game.
This week I’m heading down to California to perform for 8 days at a fair. It’s been over a year since I’ve done a fair gig, and that’s my core market. I’m working on something new, that’s a variation of Luca Volpe’s Key of Fate routine. I’ve made some major changes to stream line it for how I perform. The big change is that I can’t have the audience write their prizes. For me, that takes too much time, and logistically doesn’t really work out.
In lieu of this, I’m going to use SvenPads to force the prizes. I bought three of notebook SvenPad‘s that look like this:
For the routine I needed three notebooks with different covers. I bought three notebooks and swapped out the covers.
The picture above shows the process of switching the cover. Below is the final product of the three covers:
I think that using these three notebooks to force the three prizes streamlines the process. We’ll see how it ends up playing…
My whole life I’ve been fascinated by monte type effects. When I was a teenager I had a trick called Three Coin Con by Eddie Gibson. It was a shell game style routine that used three coins (one was a different color than the other two) and three identical covers. Here’s Paul Daniels doing it:
The trick is a bit of a fooler, it’s got some great magical moments along with the “monte” presentational hook.
The set I had as a kid has long been lost, and recently I’ve been searching for a set. Up until about a week ago, I could only find them in European coins, but I just found a set on ebay and very excited to start doing it again! I’ve got a 8 day run at a fair in about a week, hopefully with a bit of dedicated practice I can start doing it there!
Sometimes I see a magic trick and I don’t know how I feel about it. The routine below is one of them, I’ll let you watch it first:
First of all, let me say that I am not the demographic he’s going for, so factor that into my opinion of it.
Here’s what it has going for it, it’s 100% on message. All of the props are themed and it doesn’t veer away from the message. If I was booking for a large religious event, I would definitely consider this. It’s big and fills the stage.
What I personally don’t like is his almost animatronic performance of it. The clip may be taken out of context, so there may be a reason why he’s doing it like that. In my opinion there’s nothing real happening, he’s not trying to connect with me. It could be a movie on a screen, not a live performance. Once again, it’s out of context and maybe that’s what it’s for.
I love seeing things that make me think about what I like or don’t like in a performance. It makes me look at my show with a more critical eye.
I’ve posting in the past that I’ve been thrust into role of expert with the Vanishing Birdcage. There are definitely people who know a lot more than me, but I’ve spent some time with several different style of cages and know a little bit about what helps make the trick successful.
One thing is having a decent quality cage. You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on a cage, but you will have to spend a few buck. What you are looking for in a cage is something that’s smooth when collapsed. Tommy Wonder in his book mentions running a loop of string around the cage to look for snags and Billy McComb in his DVDs mentions rubbing it with a silk to look for snags. Since brick and mortar magic shops are becoming less and less common, something you can look for in an online picture is how streamlined it looks. Does it have a lot of bumps when collapsed? If you think it does, look for one that has less.
The cage that I use when collapsed is very streamlined and doesn’t have much bulk. It will easily fit through my wedding ring with the bird inside the cage! While having less bulk is important, the cage having less snag points is more important!
People always ask me what kind of vanishing birdcage do I use, and unfortunately I don’t know. It was given to me when I was a teenager by a magician because it had some broken bars. Some things to consider when picking is cage is how you are going to use it and how you need it to be on your body after the vanish. Blackstone Jr used that small Abbott’s cage because he needed to wear it for half of the show up his sleeve.
The main thing you are looking for is something that won’t get caught on your sleeve. Once you figure that out, you’re good to go!
About six month ago I came across a principle that would allow me to do a reverse three card monte, or I guess it’s technically a divination effect. I rip off three corners of a playing card, so two have indexes and one doesn’t. They are mixed up by a spectator with my back turned and I always know where the odd one is (non index corner). It’s a good puzzle, but not a good trick. It’s missing a lot, mostly an ending. I think it’s a good 3 am magic trick at a magician’s convention.
Here’s me doing it for another magician:
I’m not sure what I want to do with this. I’ve put some energy into trying to make it more than “you mix them and I tell you which one it is“, however I’m thinking that might be what it’s destined to be.
The other day my friend and great magician Terry Godfrey shared a video of The Great Carazini on his social media. There’s a lot I really love about this, but first here’s the video:
The act is well done and ad clearly something he’s done before. It’s character driven and doesn’t use a lot big props. The props he uses would play in a big theater or smaller cabaret. If he was doing multiple cabaret shows in a night, he could easily be popping around down with it as the set up is pretty minimal. For thing that had more set up (like the silks from mouth) he could have multiples set up.
The big thing is that the entire act frames his face. The act is about him and how he reacts to the strange things that happen. The whole act is great, I love it!
Recently I did a virtual lecture for a magic club in Wisconsin and one of my favorite parts of the lectures is at the end when I do stuff that’s not normally in the lecture. One of the things I did was my Coins To Glass:
It is my great platform for me to talk about fixing tricks you like, but are broken. What I mean by that is the original Copentro trick. It’s a great trick, but that base doesn’t really work with modern standards of what magic props look like. Sure you could come up with a reason to justify the base, but it still looks strange. My method was used to completely eliminate the need for a the thick base, as the coins don’t move vertically.
What’s great about show and teaching this routine to magicians is it really illustrates how I think. How I won’t stop at the original idea (usually), and will keep pushing it until I figure it out. Also that I’m open to suggestions from other performers.
Yesterday I posted about finally being able to find the clips that I use on my personal Vanishing Birdcage. They just showed up and here’s what they look like:
Here’s it in comparison to the one that’s on my personal Take Up Reel that I use for the Vanishing Birdcage:
Before the clip is usable, I have to cut off the swivel. I could leave it on, but that’s just extra bulk that’s not needed. The cord allow any rotation needed for the effect.
A side by side comparison of the two is that my old one is a bit wider than the new ones and the new ones are a bit shorter than old one.
Now that I have these, I’m going to start including them with all future take up reels that I make. I’m not sure that I’ll be selling these separately, as I may not be able to get them again in the future.
