Right now is booking season for the summer of 2025 and I’m going a lot of booking conferences and trade shows. My absolute favorite trick to do at these is my Out For Beers trick.
This trick leaves buyers with an item that has been magically altered, that they can show people. More importantly, they trick still works when they bring people over to me who know what will happen in the trick!
This routine starts with a gag and ends with a trick where picture of a full pitcher of beer empties itself!
Out for Beers is $19 and includes free shipping in the USA!
If you order Out for Beers anytime in November 2024, I’ll throw in and extra 25 of the empty beer cards! You don’t need to do anything to get these added to your order, they’ll automatically be included!
Last week I went to a booking conference to work on filling up my summer schedule. One of the things that that happens besides a trade show where different acts have booths are showcases. The showcase is one of the best ways to schedule work as you can actually show potential bookers what you actually do!
This one had some awesome acts!
Depending on the rules where you’re showcasing, your showcase set can be between 10-20 minutes, with most being about 15 minutes.
My showcase at this conference was with my crank organ.
Honestly, I was super nervous. The organ is newer to me and I don’t know it inside and out like I do my show. With my magic show almost everything that could possibly go wrong has gone wrong. That means I know how to deal with problems if they occur in my magic show. With the organ I’m positive that there’s a lot that can go wrong that I haven’t encountered. And of course problems tend to appear when there’s a lot riding on that show. Luckily nothing went wrong and I had a good showcase set!
I personally think that going to showcases is one of the best ways to book work. You can book a lot of work in a short amount of time. Most industries have some sort of showcase.
I hate the saying that “everything has been done before” when talking about creating magic tricks. A few years ago when Watch This, which is a card to watch came out that was sort of a “new” thing!
I just stumbled across this trick from 1910 that’s basically the same trick! It’s Card to Baby!
It’s basically the same thing, but instead of a watch, it’s a freaking baby!!!!
I guess there really isn’t anything new under the sun!
A couple of weeks ago I popped by the Portland SAM magic club. It was their close up contest night! There were three contestants that all did card tricks, and all with very different styles!
Then after the contest we saw some magic by Gaeton from France and a demonstration of the Vampire Block Escape!
The Vampire Block Escape is a trick I’ve seen on shelves of magic shops, but had never seen any actually do the trick. This particular one was homemade and probably 60 years old!!! The trick looked great and while the style of prop isn’t modern, the trick is still great!
I’m a huge fan of magic clubs and if you aren’t popping into your local magic club, you should. Contribute to your local magic community.
A while ago I bought a couple of vanishing birdcages and one of them turned out to be a vintage Owen vanishing birdcage. Unfortunately this cage had a bad corner joint.
I sent it up to my birdcage guy in Canada and he fixed the corner and gave it a quick polish and it looks fantastic and works great!
I’m glad I took a gamble on this cage, it’s a great addition to my collection and a good example of an older Owen vanishing birdcage!
Happy Halloween, and be safe out there to everyone performing tonight! I won’t be doing any shows tonight and that’s by choice. Years ago I decided I didn’t enjoy Halloween shows, so I don’t really do them. Sure, there are reasons that I would still do them, like an insane paycheck, but for the most part I say no.
I decided I don’t like them because people act strange when they’re in costume. Whether it’s kids or adults. And people aren’t necessarily comfortable when they’re in costume watching a show. The amount of people that will watch a show wearing a giant mask with limited vision is very high. However they won’t take the mask off.
Speaking of masks, that’s a challenge, as an audience you want to see people’s faces. As a performer you want the audience to see the face of anyone onstage and how they react. The amount of times in the past, where I would ask a kid to come onstage specifically because they weren’t wearing a mask, only to have them stand up, put a mask on and walk onstage it staggering! Or people who act the character of how they’re dressed. I don’t want to do a trick for Darth Vader, I want to do it for a human.
I think that having an audience in costume makes my show not be as could as it could be because of elements out of my control. My solution is to turn them down.
I wasn’t having fun, and there’s plenty of other things to do.
Yesterday morning I headed down to the local TV station to promote National Magic Week. I was on their morning “lifestyle” show and it was a lot of fun. One of the challenges of doing TV is that you don’t know how much time you have, they tell you about how much time, but you never really know for sure.
Here’s what I had in my pockets right before the start of the segment:
These props would keep me covered for most situations that I could encounter. You may also notice the deck of cards isn’t a bicycle deck, it’s the Penguin Marked Deck. When I do TV spots, I try to always use a marked deck. That can potentially bail me out of some situations, like when the weatherman grabs a card and tell me to name it.
The other thing that I threw in my backpack was my vanishing birdcage.
Sometimes they ask you to do a quick trick as part of a teaser segment. These are usually a 5 – 10 second bit where you don’t talk, the host is introducing your segment. You need a very visual bit to be able to do in the background.
What I ended up doing for the show was my close up card set. I didn’t do the whole thing, but the reason I chose that was that it’s a modular trick. I can take things away from in to shorten it and it has multiple points that feel like the end. That makes that routine very useful for TV spots!
About a year ago my buddy Rolando Medina started selling jigsaw puzzle coins. It’s a coin that’s been cut into a little 16 piece jigsaw puzzle. He sells the coin as a novelty, but I thought there’d be a cool trick in there.
When I first got mine, I posted a few ideas of things that could be done with it. You can read them here. The coin has been sitting on my desk for a year and I finally took it out and made a video with it!
I think this coin makes a great little social media video. Doing it in a normal roving close up setting wouldn’t be practical. It’s just the reset of putting it back together takes too much time when going from group to group. It would work in a formal close up magic show.
One of the things that I do for fun is learn old packet tricks. One of the tricks that I as messing with was Karl Fulves Mexican IV. This is a three card monte style trick, then has a “surprise” ending. When I go through the packet tricks that use playing cards, I try to think of how I could theme them as if they were an Emerson and West packet trick. Then when I go through Emerson and West packet tricks, I try to figure out if I could turn them into tricks with normal looking playing cards.
With Mexican IV, I think I got a fun them out of the trick:
I don’t really perform Halloween shows, normally I turn them down. However I got a call for a unique one that I thought was just weird enough that it’d be fun. It was a glow in the dark Easter egg hunt at a Christmas tree farm for Halloween! It’s all the holidays crammed into one, and so I said sure!
The show was outdoors and my show was after dark and that particular night it was windy and raining, so the show had a lot of challenges. The big challenge was that the wind was blowing from behind and it kept wanting to knock my case over. Luckily I was doing my nest of boxes that night. I use the David Charvet No Assistant Nest of Boxes, and they’re HEAVY, so I put it in front of my case and that solved the problem.
The other problem is the weather turned from summer to late fall temperatures this week. It as tshirt and shorts weather a few days ago, and for the gig, it definitely wasn’t! Luckily in the trunk of my car, I have travel emergency supplies. One of the things I travel with is a bulk pack of hand warmers and they really saved me that night!
The final challenge was selecting material. I looked at what I had and saw what definitely wouldn’t work because it was really windy. I’ve worked in the wind before, and can do my normal show in average wind. I’ve also done my show with 40-50 mile per hour gusts, I just wasn’t expecting that at this particular show. I was only doing 30 mins and packed the 45 min show, so having that buffer of being able to select the 2/3’s of the show that would work best with the conditions was a nice luxury to have.
Despite all of the challenges the show was a lot of fun! I love it when interesting gigs pop up!
