Sponge Balloon Dog!

I was digging through a bin of junk magic and found a couple of sets of sponge sausages. The moment I saw them, I didn’t see sausages, I saw a balloon dog! I took the sponge sausages to the green room and got to work on making a balloon dog.

sponge balloon dog

A bit so thread and I had a sponge balloon dog!

sponge balloon dog

Luckily I was sharing a the green room with Dennis Forel, who is the one balloon figure guy and he approved of it!

sponge balloon dog with dennis forel

After I made it, I did a quick search for “sponge balloon dog” and it looks like Alexander May put one out…and it’s pretty much the same concept. It’s made of sponge sausages!

I’ve been playing with making a blowing up a round balloon, popping it and it becomes the balloon dog. It’s fun, but probably will never has a spot in my show.

-Louie

Routine for Four Nightmares

Last week was the final fair of my summer season. This fair is also two weeks, so I try to work on as much stuff as possible while I’m at this one as it’s my last chance to do a lot of shows in a short period.

One of the things I was working on is Tenyo’s Four Nightmares rope trick.

This routine is good, but I think it has the same weak spot as most rope routines, and that’s the lack of an ending. There’s no definite punctuation at the end of the trick.

Oh, I took out one of the phases of the routine and that’s the 3rd effect where you tie a knot and it disappears. It’s the weakest part of the routine and removing it doesn’t hurt the routine.

For the routine, I’m presenting it as simply that I’m going to do four tricks with the rope. I then name each trick as I do them. The fourth and final trick I call it “the end” and that has helped me sell the end of the routine. I’m not 100% happy with framing the routine this way, but it’s a starting point.

Also, if I’m going to keep doing this routine, I need to learn to make the gimmicks. The white rope will get very dirty very quickly…especially out on the fairgrounds!

-Louie

Magic on the News in Fresno

Here’s an OK news appearance I did last week while performing at The Big Fresno Fair:

It’s an alright appearance, nothing crazy amazing. It’s a decent spot, but could have been much better. I was told I’d have about 3 minutes, but then that changed to two minutes and then at the last minute it changed to 90 seconds.

The change of the length totally threw my plan out the window. That’s why I typically will show up to news spots with material to fill 30 seconds, 90 seconds and three minutes. I try to plan something special and fun for the set length I’m told I’m doing, but that doesn’t always happen! That’s why it’s important to have a lot of material on you when you show up. There are some exceptions, like when you do in studio stuff you’ll normally know exactly how much time you have…but they’ll forget to tell you about a quick little “bump” you’ll be in and need a visual 5 second trick you can do.

Being prepared is the key to these news spots!

-Louie

The Moisture Festival Podcast – Felicity Hesed

On this zoom episode of the MFP (new term) we welcome in the amazing Felicity Hesed. We discuss her beginnings as an actor, her interest in theatre and how walking by a circus building one afternoon changer her life.

The Moisture Festival Podcast Felicity Hesed

She tells us what she is doing to fuse theatre with circus and the organization she started to help support that vision. A really great conversation with an awesome circus advocate. 

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Demi Deck – Review

I bought into the hype and picked up a Demi Deck while I was at Hocus-Pocus in Fresno.  Here’s a quick review of it. 



First of all, it works exactly how I thought it would work. If you think about it, there’s really only one way it can work.  I wasn’t buying it to figure out how it works, but it’s an interesting prop. 

Let’s get into actually doing the trick.  I was doing it for the groups of people who showed up as I was packing up the show.  I would tell them when my next show is and then offer to show them a quick trick and would do the Demi Deck.  It got good reactions from the people. 

Next there’s the angle issues.  It’s pretty solid from the front, I probably personally wouldn’t take this out for a roving gig where I’m going to be surrounded. But for a group of 4 or so people in front of me, the angles are pretty solid.

Now here’s what I like and why I bought this trick.  This reminds me of old school Tenyo tricks where the method is frequently more interesting than the trick. It’s just a gimmicky trick that’s fun to do!

Personally this will probably never be in my “paid” close up work. Is it something that I’ll show people who are at my house…yes!

-Louie

Working on the Rising Card

The rising card routine, that I’m working on right now is missing something. What is missing is time. The routine is really bare bones and is very short, I think without any bits it’s maybe two minutes. Since the routine involves bringing someone onto the stage, I need to get at least three minutes out of it. Ideally if someone is coming out of the audience, it needs to be closer to about five minutes.

One of the ideas that I had was to have a kid do the most “epic” card trick. I have the kid show me their epic, hero face and walk. That didn’t hit the time I tried it, but the kid was younger.

The next time I used an older kid which played better and framed it a little bit different. I had said that they are in show biz now and had them show the audience their show biz smile and walk. That played a lot better than the doing an epic trick with a younger kid. I’m not sure if that’s the route that I want to take, but it’s a step in the right direction!

The other thing that the trick is lacking is music and a punctuation when the card rises out of the deck.

-Louie

Large Size Evaporation!

They’ve been unavailable for awhile, I just finished up a batch of the 16 oz size of Evaporation magic tricks!

This size pops a bit more onstage than the smaller version. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to offer these. They’ve been hard to get since 2020, and whenever I find them, I always buy as many as I can to gimmick!

You can get them at: https://www.magicshow.tips/evaporation-magic-trick-vanishing-liquid/ or your favorite dealer!

-Louie

Trying to Read More

I’m trying to do a lot more reading in my free time. I have a huge stack of things to go through and I just started reading From Witchcraft to Card Tricks by Stephen Minch.

This is a short paper backed book follows the history of card and close up magic and it’s very interesting! Lots of things that became popular 200 years after they were first invented. It’s a real eye opener, ever you wonder who invented the double lift or at least the first place it appeared in print? This book answers that!

I totally recommend it if you’re a magic nerd like me!

-Louie

Commercial Art Supporting Art Art

One of the fun things about performing at fairs is that you work with a bunch of other entertainers.  In the green room someone was talking about a friend of theirs that has a very artsy act, but it isn’t getting much work with it.  We were trying to come up with advice to be relayed to the artsy person, and here’s what we came up with.

They need a commercial show to support the act, it’s hard to get enough work to pay the bills with just an act (artsy or not).  Making a living now with just an act is really hard, there aren’t as many variety shows, etc and enough of them to fill up a calendar.  That’s where having a show comes in. There’s a lot more opportunities to do a full show than there are just an act. 

If you look into it, while someone like Jeff McBride is known for several acts, he also has a full show to support those acts.  Now let’s look at art, someone like Andy Warhol did a lot of commercial art which brought in money to pay the bills until he could make enough doing the art-art. 

While it’s not bad to work on a passion project, you do need something that will reliably pay the bills. That’s why you also need a commercial show!

-Louie

UnPlanned Rising Card Routine

A long time ago I had an idea for a rising card routine.  Most of the rising card routines that I have seen have either a singular rise, which is the whole routine, or it’s multiple rises. The thing I have against multiple rises is that it’s essentially the same trick over and over, you just may add conditions each time to make it more impossible.  I understand it gives it a sense of build, but why wouldn’t you just do it the “hardest” way the first time if you could, the previous ones were wasting the audience’s time? 

In the idea for my rising card routine, three cards are selected and the deck is put in a glass.  An interesting point is that the cards never leave the glass after they are put in.  This is one of the interesting parts of this trick, the hands off nature of the trick.  I do touch the cards, but only the top card to show it’s not a selected card.  So the deck is in the glass, and first two cards appear one at a time to the front of the pack. Then for the finale the final card rises up from the middle of the pack.

It’s a good one, two, three set of reveals.  It’s also done with me solo onstage, so no one physically has to come up on stage and it ends with a nice applause pose.

There are some challenges with the original routine.  The placements of the gimmick in the deck and best way to hide the lock that I built into my rising card gimmick are some of the more major challenges. I took my props for this routine to the green room of the fair I’m working at and was showing it to Mickey O’Connor and Bri Crabtree for their thoughts.  While messing around with a different idea, I came up with a way to use a someone from the audience as a way to “lock” the rising card in the down position.  It was a real “break through” for the routine…also it marked a complete change of the routine.  It’s now a two card revelation with someone onstage, and that person does the magic.  It is a better routine after the changes, and this is a great example of how bouncing around ideas with other people can make a huge difference!

-Louie