Al Koran…

A couple of weeks ago at Potter and Potter‘s Ken Klosterman auction I managed to win one item. It was Al Koran…well some of his ashes and a sealed deck of his cards along with a display.

If you don’t know much about him, here he is on the Ed Sullivan show:

Al invented Ring Flite and the Medallion, both tricks I’ve done a version of during my career!

-Louie

Mask Magic…

Something that still bugs me are performers that are still using facemasks in their shows as if they are topical. They really aren’t, it’s lazy creativity. I’ve written about this before (you can read it here), and my thoughts haven’t changed.

Not too long ago I figured out what the problem with 99 % of the mask tricks are:

YOU HAVE TO TAKE THE MASK OFF TO DO THE TRICK

By simply doing the trick, you are defeating the purpose of the prop. That’s the flaw in all of these tricks. The rare exception is something like a color changing mask. If someone came up with a trick where you didn’t take the mask off for the trick, that would make it make sense.

Keeping the mask on really limits what you can do. That condition pretty much leaves you with a color change, with out doing some actual thinking. Here’s some ideas that I don’t have a method for:

  • Tongue thru mask
  • Eating / drinking thru the mask
  • shrinking / growing mask
  • things appearing on the ear loops: Kinda like the Ring Flite trick
  • Broken and restored ear loop
  • It moving by itself: Running gag: while you are talking it keeps moving up your face. You move it down, and it moves up again
  • Multiplying: you keep taking them off, and there’s always one on your face. You’d have to remove a large amount, so that it’s clear you didn’t just have four masks on.

All of the above tricks keep a mask on your face. However you still have a problem to face, it’s a used hygiene product you are using. Doing a trick with a tissue from the box uses a clean hygiene product. Doing a trick with a tissue you just blew your nose on is a used hygiene product. That’s something else to consider, technically once you touch or take it off with your bare hands, you are supposed to wash your hands.

How do you solve this?

I don’t know the answer, but then I also really don’t want to do a trick with a facemask, so you’ll have to figure that out for yourself if you want to do a trick with a face mask!