Last week has been a HUGE week for me creatively. I’ve come up with three ideas for stage routines. One of them I actually had what I needed to try out and got to do about eight times onstage!
All three of them are comedy mentalism. Two of the three of them focus on the process of what the audience perceives is happening and the other is fairly generic mentalism.
You can read a little bit about one of them here:
https://www.magicshow.tips/magic-show-tips/showing-process-for-mentalism/
The second one is a lock trick where someone picks a key and that’s the only one out of six keys that opens the lock. Fairly standard, but and some process to it and it’s more of a stand out trick.
The premise of the trick is luck.
I get someone who says they’re lucky onstage. The try out all of the keys and confirm that only one will unlock a lock. What’s cool about the lock I’m using is that I don’t need to touch any of this!
They are now locked by their beltloop to a folding chair with short piece of chain.
Now to test their luck, I’ll flip a coin and for every correct flip they get a key to try to free themself. For each flip, they get it wrong…However on the last flip, when the call it and it’s wrong, I openly flip the coin to what they called to so that the get one key.
They select the key, it opens the lock and it frees them!
I’m going to try this out later this week to see how it plays. When I am trying new things, I want to get them onstage as quick as possible. I want to get a sense for how it actually plays with my personality. If it feels right, I’ll start working on writing up a more complete script for it. If it doesn’t, I need to reevaluate whether I should try a different angle, or stop doing it.
Louie
Tag: mentalism
Showing Process for Mentalism
When I went to a Gerry McCambridge workshop a few years ago, he talked about how it was important for a mentalist to show the process of how they’re reading a mind. A common process shown by mentalists is reading someone’s body language. In the mentalism I do that’s not presented as a coincidence, I try to show a process that’s believable.
I’ve been playing with unbelievable processes. One idea I had was for someone who it thinking of a work, they whisper it into their fist, then the need to get that idea into my head…so they slap me in the face!
That was just an idea, but it lead to a couple other ideas that were more workable. The idea I think I’m going to go with is to have someone think of a word. Then I hand them a paper roll and they are going to swing it like a baseball bat at my belly in a way that feels like their word.
I think there’s a ton of comedy potential that can happen around how the hit me. They can’t hurt me with the paper roll as it just collapses if they swing it hard.
Then after I verbally reveal the word, I can unroll the paper tube and it says the word they are thinking of!
I think this routine has potential.
-Louie
A Tip for Mentalists
A while ago I worked with a mentalist and they did a “psychometry” sort of routine where they matched things with the object’s owner. To do that the objects were put in bags then mixed up before the mentalist returned them to the proper owner. This mentalist (and many others that I’ve seen) put glasses on to do the part where they needed to read the marks and removed them after they read the marks.
DON’T DO THAT!
Sure probably 90% of audiences won’t notice that or make the connection, however many do. It’s like casually looking at an Apple Watch to get information, people notice. A friend of mine who isn’t a magician, but books big events had a mentalist and I asked how they were. My friends response was, “they looked at their watch a lot” and that told me all I needed to know.
Audiences do notice these things. Can you come up with a different way of making the prop?
Sew beads into it’s marked by feel?
Or use something that’s easier to see?
Can you wear glasses your whole show?
Think outside of the prop you bought that will work better with your eyesight!
-Louie
Seance Spirit Hand!
One of the things that I make every now and then are seance/spirit hands. These are hands that tap messages from ghosts. I just make and sell the shell of the hand, it’s up to the buyer to gimmick them or use a gimmicked board wit them. The hands are also unpainted so that they can be decorated for whatever look the buyer wants.
Here’s one of the hands that was decorated and packaged beautifully by someone who bought on of my seance/spirit hand shells!
No one really makes a these hands and if you want one, the hand shells that I make are a good starting point!
-Louie
Vintage Magic Trick – Destiny Deck by Nick Trost
The Destiny Deck by Nick Trost is a fun little routine that has a few effects that happen one after the other. Here’s what the trick looks like:
@louiefoxx Vintage Magic Trick! Destiny Deck by Nick Trost! #magictrick #cardtrick #vintagemagic #cardmagic#nicktrost #louiefoxx #dice #closeupmagic #antiquemagic #antique ♬ original sound – Louie Foxx
What I’d probably do to change the trick is eliminate the dice and have people hold up fingers for their number. That frees up some pocket space and the trick will still work. It’s a fun trick to do, the only problem is the reset and because of that it’s something that I really won’t carry with me. However I did have fun doing it for a couple of days!
Also it looks like Abbott’s Magic has a few left in stock: https://abbottmagic.com/shop/ols/products/nick-trost-destiny-deck
-Louie
Best Spoons and Forks for Metal Bending!
Frequently, I see people ask in social media groups “what are the best spoons/forks for metal bending?” The answers are all over the place, from ones specifically being sold at magic shops to Walmart. For me, you can’t the the Costco spoons and forks!
The cheap ones less than 31 cents per fork and less than 27 cents per spoon. They’re soft and ready to go out of the package. The normal Costco doesn’t normally stock these but the Business Costco does! A normal Costco membership will get you into the business Costco and walking around you might find other things you need for your show that the normal Costco doesn’t have.
I don’t know if Costco sells them online, but you should be able to search based on the info in the pictures above.
Happy spoon/fork bending!
-Louie
Mentalism for Kids…
Years ago, when I was a teenager I saw Lee Earle lecture. He did his gumball prediction and then warned that it’s not a kid show trick and that mentalism doesn’t work for kids. Lee said something like, “before you can read someone’s mind, they must first have a mind”. That’s a great quote, but it’s wrong.
You absolutely can do mentalism for kids, but ultimately it comes down to how you frame it. In my library / summer camp show for this year I do three mentalism tricks.
They aren’t framed as “mind reading” and that’s what makes them work, but they are still 100% mentalism. All three are essentially predictions.
One of them I used a Cootie Catcher / Fortune Teller to determine what I’m going to have for lunch or dinner that day.
Another is a card prediction followed by a series of coincidence effects. The third is a strange happening, which is really a multiple revelation of predictions. All three of them are highlights of the show and frequently mentioned when I ask kids in the autograph line what their favorite tricks were.
Don’t be afraid of mentalism for kids, you just need to make it fun and relatable to them.
-Louie
The Magic Shop and More!
Last week I was doing a show in Astoria, OR. Whenever I’m in that area I swing by and visit Seth who owns the shop.
It’s really a pitch shop that sells magic tricks to tourists, however they really well stocked with a lot of magic that’s for non-beginners.
When I was there I picked up a Rainbow Deck and a copy of the reprint of the book Mind Myth & Magick by TA Waters. This book when it first came out in the mid 1990’s sold for $60. When I was a teenager working in the magic shop, we had a couple of copies of this book and they took probably a decade to sell. This book wasn’t a hot item at the time. While it is a giant book, $60 was about double what a magic book sold for at that time. Then over the next few decades this book became harder to find with copies selling for over $300! This reprint at $99.95 is a great deal!
The only thing that I don’t like about the book is that I’m taking it on the road with me, and it’s the size of a phone book and I’ll be lugging it around the country in my backpack!
-Louie
Weather Prediction Mentalism Trick
A while ago I wrote a post about me having Trigger Finger, which is a tendon issue in my knuckle. I noticed that it was bad when it was raining, so that means I have an old man super power, my finger can predict the weather!
What can I do with that?
It got me thinking about doing a weather prediction effect. The idea of the trick will be that someone says the name of a city, and I write down what my finger thinks the weather in that city is.
I wanted the prediction to be bigger that something that could be accomplished with a nail writer. After some writing of different ideas, I hit upon using weather icons:
The flow of the effect is:
- A city is chosen
- The prediction is written down
- The weather is the city is determined
- The correct icon matching the weather is removed
- The written prediction is shown to match the icon
That’s the flow.
I originally had a step earlier in the process that had me showing all the different possible icons. I decided that’s really dead time, and not needed, because we’re going to go through them later to find the correct one.
The method is really simple, I spent a lot of time writing more complex methods, but this was the most simple and direct method that I came up with.
I tried it for the first time a couple of days ago and it worked! Now to do it more and create a more complete routine.
-Louie
Flux vs Espionage
About a month or so ago I had a gig where I was booked specifically as a mentalist. I only added one new thing to what I already do and that was ProMystic’s Flux. I really liked what I could do with it, however the problem is coming up with an out if it fails. The solution that I came to was to have two of them.
Instead of buying a second Flux, I picked up Espionage by Iarvel Magic which is about $50 cheaper than flux. Now having used both of them I decided that Flux is the better of the two and worth the extra money.
First of all both do the exact same thing, they detect a magnet. What I dislike about Espionage is that it’s hard to tell if you turned it on while its in your pocket, where Flux will vibrate when you turn it on. Also the range on Espionage was a little bit shorter than with Flux. Those two things are a big deal when you’re out there performing and to me with the extra money.
-Louie