by Sexton Blake » Sep 22nd, '06, 15:35
I've been meaning to mention this for ages, but I've kept forgetting.
On Vol 4 of the DVDs (or page 161 of the book) there's a trick called Kangeroo Card. This ends with a splendidly visual revelation. Unfortunately, it's pretty much dead in the water because it relies on borrowing (or happening to have with you) a felt hat of the kind men stopped wearing in about 1961. I wept over this fact on many a long night. But then I happened to discover that, instead of a hat, you can do it with one of those little brown paper bags you get given to carry your obscenely over-priced tea or coffee on trains - and possibly at other obscenely over-priced tea and coffee outlets. These are so perfect that they could have been made for the trick (they have a fold that's like the crease in a hat, y'see, and it's one that can also be slyly 'popped out' so specs examining the bag/cards after the trick are even more stumped) . They are deeper and narrower than a hat, yes, which means that it's slightly more difficult to pull off the ending (the card can hit the sides and fall back). But, for the price of that, the effect is even more lovely because (1) you don't have to hold it oddly high up to prevent the specs seeing inside, (2) you quite obviously can't see the cards inside either, which sells it more, (3) it's much more arresting when the card flies, spinning, into the air out of the thing. In fact, it seems that, with a bag, 'how you make the card jump out' is often a mystery - not merely 'how you make just their card jump out'. Hold the bag by a bottom corner, wide side facing the specs, and focus your eyes on the top of it: I suspect that the sheer distance between the bottom of the bag and the opening comes into play here, as does the fact that your other hand is now 'behind and low' instead of 'to the side and low'. Whatever the reason, I was surprised when - when I tested this on my long-suffering, magic guinea pig, twelve-year-old son - that not only was he wowed, but he said, 'OK, you don't have to tell me how you knew my card. Just please tell me how you made it fly out of the bag.'
I didn't tell him, of course. As, one day, I hope he won't tell his son.
An almost final thing - because the DVD performance does it otherwise - is that I'd ask people to pass you/examine/whatever the bag after the card has been selected and returned. I use the pass (you don't have to, obviously, but I've always found the pass easy and safe - far more so than shuffling to a break, say, which I'm well capable of screwing up). The covering misdirection of people examining a bag to check it's entirely normal is that vast that you're almost embarrassed to make the move while they're doing it because it's so simple.
An actually final thing: this, I hope you see, isn't just about being able to get an abandoned train bag for free, instead of having to buy a Fedora. What it means is that a trick that would need to be 'staged' with a hat, can now be done naturally or even, in many cases, entirely inpromptu. Also, there's little more pleasing in magic than, after you've performed this trick, watching several intelligent people spend quite a long time peering investigatively into a paper bag.