cracker magic – MagicShow.Tips

Crackers…

This week I’m performing at a 9 day fair and it’s been a little while since I’ve done my full stage show, so I’ve had a few little road bumps. The biggest one is that I’m not doing my cracker card trick. It’s a fun trick with some twists and turns and it’s an unusual trick.

The problem is the cracker packaging I need to do the trick doesn’t appear to be made anymore. I need to load a cracker into a cracker wrapper and seal it, and all of the packing that I’ve found recently don’t work for the resealing part, and are super tight making the loading really difficult without damaging the cracker.

After much searching, this cracker finally popped up. The packaging looks looser that what I’ve been able to get recently. While that solves one of the issues, it doesn’t solve the other. The placement of the seam on the packaging is in the middle, and that won’t work for the resealing of the cracker package.

I’ve got an idea of how to make it work, however you can’t just order one or two crackers to try out the idea. I need to order a box of 500 of them and after shipping I’m about $50 into crackers! The trick is worth the gamble, let’s hope it works when they show up on Thursday!

Quarantining With Props….

Yesterday I mentioned that I’m out of town performing. I had to fly to this gig and it’s been a while since I’ve had to fly. Here’s the gear I use to fly:

The Pelican Air 1615 carries my show props, then the suitcase holds my costumes, non show clothes and other personal items. The particular gig I’m out for right now required me to go from the airport to the hotel and quarantine for two days. Then I have to go direct from the hotel to the gig…in addition to passing several COVID tests over the course of about a week.

This has presented some unusual challenges. Normally I would buy a few of the “grocery store” props once I got to the city I’m performing in. That’s not an option for this gig due to the quarantine. I had carry onto the plane some items that are semi fragile.

One of the hard things was travelling with bananas that I intend to use several days later was finding green bananas (that would be nice and yellow in three days). I ended up having to go to a restaurant supply place and had to buy a box of green bananas!

I could have had the production provide the bananas, however in the past when I’ve had them provided for me, they always give me the worst bananas. Same with the crackers…I rarely get exactly what I ask for. The trick is pretty specific to what I need. For example, I use unsalted crackers as they are easier to write on than salted crackers. I’m just trying to eliminate a headache before it happens.

Even More Cracker Action!

One of the great things about working at fairs is that you have a lot of chances to perform and work on new material. This trick with a cracker that I’ve written about here over the last couple of days has progressed nicely.

A big change I made is that instead of making the cracker reappear in an impossible location, I’m restoring the broken cracker. After I catch the cracker and smash it, I’m putting the crumbs into an envelope and offer it to the kid as a prize. I then rip open the envelope and dump out a restored cracker! I’m still doing the restored cracker with the wrong name, but this restoration phase is new.

The other change is that I was doing a pass to bring the signed cracker to the top. Doing a classic pass with crackers is really hard to do invisibly, so I’m doing a side steal. A side steal is sooo much easier with a cracker than a card!

The final change was switching from a Ritz Cracker to a Saltine Cracker. A saltine is less greasy and the signature shows up better on the white cracker.

All of these small changes are starting to add up a bigger results.