Last week I popped by Magic Monday in Seattle. This is a fun magic show, that I think of as a magic open mic. It’s a place for me to work on new material, or knock the dust off of old routines that I haven’t done for a while. One of the fun things about the show is that there’s a huge mix in performance styles, and experience levels of the magicians.
The nice thing about this is after the show we all go downstairs to the pub and it’s a fun little magic jam! I have an idea for the Cards Across trick and I had Ruben Barron show me the one that he does (Las Vegas Leaper), which was helpful to me!
On this episode of the Moisture Festival Podcast we welcome Martika Daniels. She tells us about growing up in the Military and how being stationed in Germany exposed her to circus arts and busking.
She tells us how stunts helped her deal with crippling anxiety and depression and how she weaves that message into her performances. We also discuss her new book that is available now. A great conversation with a fantastic person.
Many years ago I made a gimmick that can visually turn a one dollar bill into a twenty dollar bill. I use this all the time promotional videos for events and in virtual shows. A while ago when I was on the road, I tried to come up with a lot of different presentations for TikTok with the one gimmick.
Those five tricks are all essentially the same trick, just presented differently to hopefully give them all a different feel. Those five are in addition to how I do it in virtual shows. I think getting a lot of mileage with a single gimmick is a big advantage with social media, where you can get multiple videos out of a single trick!
I’m relearning to do the strait jacket escape while wrapped in 50 feet of chain. One of the things that I recently figured out, which made me feel dumb that I never realized this before was the chain management.
I used to just throw the chain in the bottom of my case. The problem with that is that it would frequently tangle. I started keeping it on a spool and it makes a huge difference! The spool makes laying it out and cleaning it up really easy!
The locks also are locked to the spool making it an neat and tidy package!
I’m finally wrapping up reading Charlie Frye‘s magic book Sleightly Absurd. I picked this up at Hocus Pocus in Fresno way back in October when I was visiting their shop.
This book is a fun read and it has a lot of “non traditional” magic book feeling routines in it. The routines have endings to them, which is something that lacks in many magic books by magicians who aren’t out there working. The other thing is that Charlie isn’t a “I do easy stuff so I can concentrate on performing” type of person. He’s doing things with whatever level of difficulty that the trick requires to make the trick the best. Sometimes that’s means hard sleight of hand and sometimes it’s a math principle. I totally respect that approach!
One of the interesting things for me is towards the back of the book there’s Charlie’s approach to Any Card at Any Number. It’s a fairly standard approach where you use a memorized deck and a variety of techniques to get the card at the desired number. He does a great job of breaking down his thought process how determines the best way to go about it and describes many scenarios.
For me the best part is how he calculates the stack number backwards (from the face of the deck).
I had to read that part about half a dozen times for it to make sense for me and once I did, it made total sense! I also figured out a way to get rid of having to remember the pairs, they all all up to 3 or 13, so there’s no memorization of the five pairs, just remembering one rule. This is a game changer for me, it makes the doing the math from the face of the deck insanely easy! This one little thing is worth the price of the book if you use a memorized deck!
This is a great book and totally worth the $75 it sells for!
I was playing with Fly Cards II by Aldo Columbini from 1991. I’m not familiar with Fly Cards I, so I can’t compare the two to talk about the improvements that this one has over the original. The effect is similar to an ace assembly, you have four cards with flies on them and a dozen blank cards. You make put 3 blank cards on each card with a fly. The first fly disappears and reappears in the next packet, so that packet now has two flies. Then those disappear and reappear in the third, so that packet now has three. Finally the three flies disappear and you accidentally tap the fourth packet revealing the surprise ending of four smashed flies.
What I like about the trick is the progressive assembly, where the flies keep moving to the next packet. What I don’t like is the flies. It’s strange theming, maybe something like honey bees would be better, but then the smashed ending would have to be different as you don’t want to smush honey bees. I think this idea would be interesting in an ace assembly context, however the problem is that I don’t think it would work out as you’re passing off one card as two several times.
It’s a good trick, and I think if someone spent some time thinking of a better theme OR used it as a custom thing for a social media video it’d be useful!
Whenever I get any product that comes in the fancy box that has a magnetic flap in it, I always rip out the magnets and metal shims before I recycle the boxes.
The magnets and shims are very thin, which makes them great for magic!
The round shims are perfect for adding t playing cards or dollar bills!
Look around you at product packaging that you would normally just get rid of. There’s tons of useful things, like clear, rigid plastic. I used that to make the gimmick for my signed cracker routine. The round shims are perfect for adding t playing cards or dollar bills!
Look around you at product packaging that you would normally just get rid of. There’s tons of useful things, like clear, rigid plastic. I used that to make the gimmick for my signed cracker routine.
Over the weekend my buddy Mike Dobias hosted a magic garage sale! Mike had bought out the inventory of Mickey Hades magic shop in the 1990’s and wanted to get what was left of it out of his garage. He also had some of his old personal props from his shows and let me bring a couple of boxes of stuff.
There were some fun surprises, like a stack of Bill Goldman’s Monkey in the Middle trick, Dean Gunnarson’s Escape Artist trading cards and Bob Driebeck’s Necktie Servante that was put out by Nielson Magic!
I took home a banker’s box full of old packet tricks, which will end up on my Tik Tok where I show “vintage magic tricks”. If you aren’t following me on Tik Tok, shoot over there and give me a follow at: https://www.tiktok.com/@louiefoxx
Then there was the social aspect of hanging out and BSing with other magicians! It was a fun day!
One of my favorite gimmicks and one that I use in almost all of my stage shows is Evaporation! This is a way to make liquid vanish from a single serve bottle of Sunny D (orange juice). The “effect” is similar to a Magic Milk Pitcher, however the method is very different.
This gimmick is super versatile, and over the years I’ve used it for a lot of different routines. Click the play button below to watch the video:
I just made a big batch of them, and if order one now through July 20th, 2024 I’ll include my trick Out For Beers (a $19 value) for free with it!
You don’t need to do anything special to get this deal, simply order the Evaporation trick and I’ll automatically include it with your order.
A few weeks ago I was performing at a fair. I was doing street style shows and they gave me an assigned spot and assigned times. On paper this sounds like a good idea, however in practice it’s usually a horrible idea. 99% of the time the entertainment coordinator doesn’t walk the grounds at different times of the day to see where the shade is.
Here’s one of my assigned spots a few minutes before my assigned start time:
I should mention it was over 90 degrees out and you’ll notice there’s no shade. If you look to the right, you’ll see my case is in the shade, but most of the case is in the sun. There’s zero usable shade at this spot and very few people will stand in the sun for more than a few minutes. I personally will stand in the sun as I’m getting paid, but I don’t expect an audience to do that.
However a little bit up the pathway there’s this spot:
There’s plenty of shade and I decided to “go rogue” and do my magic show there with shade for the audience. I was able to get people to stop here and watch the show.
Personally I’m a “ask for permission” person and not a just do it and “ask for forgiveness” person. However this was a situation where it made sense and if anyone asked about it, I could simply show them the pictures and I think they’d agree with me. Also I’d probably walk that person into the full sun spot and then show them the pictures and talk for a long time and watch them get uncomfortable in the sun to emphasize my point.
