Another Vanishing Bird Cage has been added to my collection. This is (probably) a Sherms Vanishing Bird Cage. This is the original design that Milson Worth used for their Silver Meteor Vanishing Bird Cage, but the Milson Worth Cage was smaller.
This has an “S&” stamped on one side near the clip and a “T” on the other side.
The reason I’m not positive that this is a Sherms is that there’s one on eBay listed as a Warren Simms Vanishing Bird Cage and it has the same “S&” stamp on it, and it has brass bars.
No matter who made it, it’s a cool cage!
If you have positive info on the maker, let me know!
It’s been years since I’ve done an in home kids birthday party magic show, and recently I did two of them back to back! Let me say, I’m not above doing them, they just don’t work with my performing schedule. I did these two to help out a friend who booked them, but had to leave town to go to a funeral, so I stepped in and did them for him.
One thing that was interesting to me was that ALL of the adults watched the show with the kids. They stood in the back and watched the show and the kids sat on the floor.
One thing I read in magic groups on social media is that magicians complain that the adults won’t stop talking during their show. I didn’t have that problem for either of the shows, in fact I had a parent say, “This is the most fun birthday party I’ve been to“. I think the problem is that many magicians do a children’s show, and not a family show. There’s a huge difference between the two. If you look at your audience and there’s a lot of adults, you should be doing a family show and not a kids show.
I think of my show as a show for grown up that kids like. My style is very different from a lot of people who perform for families, there are not colorful props. It’s basically me with handheld props that are pretty basic looking. However I fill the stage with the kids personalities. I talk to them, and with my style of play, it works. I like it when the kids fight back with me in a routine when I say or do something dumb, but I also call them out when they do!
I also have jokes that are not just for the kids, one of my opening bits with my rope line is an insurance joke. Doing that early on, it teaches the parents that this is a show also for them.
For someone starting out doing birthday parties, simply saying, “you gotta engage the adults” isn’t a magic pill that will solve the problem. Your job is to entertain the kids, get good at that. However while you are getting good at that, slowly start working at figuring out how to engage the adults. Maybe adding a line here or there, or making sure the magic in your show is STRONG! The only way to learn to do this is do A LOT of birthday parties and over time you’ll get better.
Ove the weekend my wife and I went out to check out Justin Willman’s Illusionati show in Portland. I’ll start with saying that I think his live show is great! He probably has one of the best opening tricks that I’ve seen. It wins over the audience and sets up his personality perfectly!
The other thing that Justin does really well is his use of the “close up camera”. All of the stuff that he does with it are enhanced by the camera, and not reliant on the camera. It’s all sorta interactive, it’s not just a close up on his hands while he does tricks. It’s all part of larger things. If you’re thinking of using a camera in your show, you really should go see Justin’s show.
The other thing that he does really well is letting spontaneous things happen. He’s the star of the show, but he doesn’t mind sharing that spotlight. That’s a huge contrast from a lot of “comedy magicians” where the second someone from the audience does something funny or interesting, they shut them down. It’s these spontaneous things that make a live show fun!
If Justin Willman in your town, be sure to check him out!
One of the things that I’ve noticed when going through old packet tricks from the 1970’s and 1980’s is that a lot of them will have a strange point where an extra card just appears. A good example of this is Mexican IV by Karl Fulves.
It’s strange when 3 cards turn into 4 cards, I don’t know how I feel about that. I was trying to give the trick some context and make the appearance of the fourth card make some sense, so here’s what I came up with:
Having the baby appear gives the fourth card appear some context, instead of a four turning into two aces. Another thing that I added was the change of the dog card to the dog and cat card, so there’s a little bonus effect in there!
If you’re learning a trick and something doesn’t make sense, figure out a way for it to make sense!
The other night I was chatting with a magician that I had met at a zoom magic show. He was asking me about working comedy clubs.
There were a couple of things, first he didn’t know his Laughs Per Minute (LPM). That’s a huge thing to know if you want to work in comedy. It’s a good metric to how funny your show is. To calculate this, count all of the laughs in your show and divide that by the length of your show. So if you get 90 laughs in a 45 minute show your LPM’s are 2. A stand up comedian will get about 6 or more, however most magicians won’t get that high. Magic has information that needs to be conveyed for a trick to work. As Bob Sheets once told me there’s comedy time and magic time and they don’t overlap.
Then I asked this magician for his website and video and he said his “site sucked” and his video wasn’t good. I told him that you NEED the correct promo if you want to level up or move into another market. I guess the other option to move into the market is to be soo good that you get work, but that’s a much longer and harder road to take. You’d literally be doing garbage gigs to hope someone sees you that books better gigs and then keep stepping up. There’s nothing wrong with this way, but it’s a lot more legwork than just sending out video and having bookers visit your website.
In a nutshell, my advice for levelling up your show in your current market or to break into a new market is to look at what people who are already in that market have for promo and get your stuff to that level and then start selling! If you reach out to a booker and they ask for a 2-3 min sizzle reel and two 5-8 minute unedited full routines, can you immediately send that? No booker wants to wait a month for you to send them stuff. Sure there’s the odd exotic request for an unusual piece of promo that may take you a couple of days to make, but the booker will understand if it’s truly a strange request.
I know this isn’t a fun answer to how to get work, but it’s what most people need to hear. If you don’t like your promo, how do you expect anyone else to?
In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s before magic became a global market, it was harder to get a trick that was made in a different country. What would happen is magicians would bring things back when they travelled to another country. One magician that did this was Howard Schwarzman and he would write instructions in English and sell the tricks as “Howard Schwarzman Presents…”.
One of these tricks was called Babushka. Here’s the what the trick looks like:
This is a trick where the method is fairly “Rube Goldberg” in that’s it’s probably way more involved than it needs to be, but it’s fun to do! It reminds me of 1990’s Tenyo magic, it’s a super clever method!
Now for a little Howie Schwarzman story. I never met him in person, but I did sell him a couple of collectable tricks on eBay. After he won the auction he told me he wanted me to send him the items THEN he’d send me a check. I didn’t accept checks as a form of payment and reminded him of that. He said, “Do you know who I am? I’m Howie Schwarzman”. I told him I didn’t care who he is. I did let him mail me a check, but I held it for two weeks for it to clear, he wasn’t happy with that. That’s was my only interaction with Howie.
If you can find a Babushka, it’s totally worth tracking down to play with!
Over on TikTok I post a lot of videos of vintage magic trick and a recent one was of my Milson Worth Silk Cabby. There are two ways I do these videos. The first is EXACTLY how the instructions say, then if I don’t have the original instructions, I try to add a little bit to the the basic function of the trick.
So the trick has a little bit of a routine, besides the standing production. It’s got three vanishes and then the kicker ending. I was trying to maximize how much I could get out of the Silk Cabby beyond just a production of a lot of silks.
Sometimes when you’re out there performing you get to do “media”. That’s talking or performing for the newspaper or for the TV news.
Here’s a newspaper article from over there summer, I did edit out the name of where I was performing.
Sometimes you just know early on that you want to spend your life doing card tricks.
“I saw a show when I was 5, and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world,” magician Louie Foxx said. “I decided that was going to be my job.”
Foxx was at the (fair name) Fair last week doing three shows a day. He’s been to our fair a few times in the past…
Foxx’s website describes him as the consummate kid who never grew up, and that’s the sort of energy he brings to his show. He does his illusions casually, almost off handedly; no cape, top hat and wand for him. Besides the card tricks – using oversized decks that require a lot of dexterity to handle – several of his illusions involved long pieces of colored paper or strings. One trick had him pouring out what appears to be water from a paper cup, until you realize that it’s a single strip of paper, and the cup disappears with it. He designated one audience member at a Thursday afternoon show as his personal wastebasket, and every time a trick resulted in a large amount of paper left over, he would bestow it on that spectator, who took it with good humor.
For all his silliness, Foxx is apparently well respected in the prestidigitation business. He holds two Guinness World Records, and the Society of American Magicians voted him the Best Stage Magician and Best Close-up Magician in Minnesota in 1996, according to his website. He’s also appeared on the TV show “America’s Got Talent,” he told his audience Thursday.
“I was on season six of that show,” Foxx said. “On my last appearance on the show, the judges were Piers Morgan, Sharon Osbourne and Howie Mandel. Piers Morgan said I was an utter waste of time, Sharon Osbourne said I was fantastic, and Howie Mandel said I’d be perfect for (city name). People ask, ‘How far did you make it in the show?’ I’m like, ‘Almost to (city name)!’ So close to my dreams.”
Foxx grew up near Vancouver in the little town of La Center, he said. He does the fair circuit from the end of April through October, and in the off-season works cruise ships, comedy clubs and corporate events.
Foxx’s interest in show business is apparently genetic. His daughter, who’s 20, graduated college in June and promptly ran away with the circus, he said.
“She’s (doing) three shows a day,” he said. “She gets put in a straitjacket, wrapped up in 50 feet of chain, and – in theory – gets out.”
This article is a good example of no matter how clear you are, they will get things wrong. I’m very clear in the show about where I live and grew up, and I didn’t grow up in the town of La Center, it’s where I currently live. I even have a joke about where I’ve lived that lays out the chronology of where I’ve lived.
All in all, it’s not a bad newspaper article, it just got several things wrong.
On this episode we welcome in Moisture Festival founder Maque daVis. Maque tells us about the roots of the festival, how it all was organized and some of the failures and successes of the early years.
He discusses how the festival has evolved and what he thinks the future holds. We also get into his history being the head of fire safety at Burning Man. A fantastic interview with one of the people that made this all possible.
The batch of Applause Please 2: The Encore arrived over the weekend and they’re shipping out today! This was unavailable for about a year and I now have them in stock!
This is the props for my object in lightbulb routines. You get two complete routines with all of the necessary props* for my liquid in lightbulb routine and my color changing silk to lightbulb routine. In addition to that you learn how to use it as a warm up and there’s some other bonus ideas!
*it doesn’t come with any liquid, so you’ll need to get some red Gatorade or make some by adding food coloring to water if you want to do the liquid in lightbulb routine.
