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as I metioned elsewhere I spent all the last week floating on a canal barge from Nantwitch to the Pontcysyllte aqueduct and back with my fiancee and parents.

I took with me a bag of tricks to attempt to impress them, as I don't get many opportunities to hone my performance skill right now. Somehow the same combination of nerves and high stakes never arises when performing for a mirror. If it please the jury I thought I'd give a little run down of how it went and what I learned.

First night, Biddle trick
This one went off without a hitch, except that I almost forgot to place the cut half of the deck in someone else's hand before counting off the five possible cards. as such the timing of it was a little out and felt awkward. Otherwise worked just fine though. When I did this same trick later I attempted a handling where I pretended to guess the card wrong, to add an extra layer of impossibility before the vanish and relocation of their card and it backfired. My spectator felt GENUINELY bad for me having messed up and convinced me that the wrong card was actually their card. At which point I said I messed up and that I was being daft and actually thought their card was the 9. He then said actually it was, but felt bad for me. When I did the final vanish however, that then sort of gave away that I knew it all along. Disappointing end. But on the holiday, went well.

Second night, OOTW, Galaxy variation.
Long story short, I fscked up.
I handed my mother the deck to riffle shuffle and it looked way too choppy to have worked. Playing with my premise as it being me judging her ability to shuffle and discern the colours, making her the magician, I said it would good but we should try again. Of course to me that meant pull apart the riffled halves and try again. She just squared the deck. not having a backup planned, I was totally thrown and said that actually it wouldn't work if she shuffled twice, and moved onto a two card monte. I'll get onto that later.
Later in the evening I re did OOTW without her shuffling (so as not to give anything away about the two events being linked).
When I did the galaxy spread at the end, I put the two halves of cards together in the wrong order, meaning it wasn't a clean red/black sprea,d rather a red black red spread. Covered it presentationally by saying Ishold have out those on the bottom and quickly pulling them out of the spread, hoping thye wouldn't notice the discrepancy. they didn't.
What I learned:
in my haste to make it all go right first time, I didn't even LOOK at the result of the first shuffle. When I went through to fish out the cards for the two card monte however, I saw that it would have done just fine. Trust in the method is the lesson here, and also let events play out slower. Part of what made me compile the halves in the wrong order was that panic moment of guilt when I wanted to get to a clean ending position as quickly as possible. Need to control that.

Also second night, Two Card Monte
Incidentally these are the names I learned these under, if I'm getting them wrong, let me know. This one worked fine until I reached the point when I needed misdirection for my t*p c***ge (I never know which words to star out in these explanations) when I asked my mother to guess what card I was holding (having already placed the first ending card in her hand, she guessed wrong. At this point she was meant to be following and when she guessed wrong I mistakenly used the opportunity for a mini reveal, showing that I was holding the card she thought she was holding. Of course I didn't think this through because the confusion would have been ideal for pulling off the next move. When I showed the card in my hand, she looked at the card in hers, and the whole thing was ruined. she thought that was the end of the trick and I let her think it was, bbecause of the now insurmountable heat that was on me.
What Iearned:
Outside of it all, I now think that I could have rescued it for a different ending, and I think if there's one skill I need to learn it's how to better work an audience. It should have been OBVIOUS to me that she'd check her own hand in that scenario. Later doing this for someone else I learned that t*p c***ges are pretty much impossible to cover when sat at a table, but that was an easy lesson and one well remembered.

Third night boardgames went on too late to do a trick, but I had some fun with the game cards. Every time a 7 was rolled, anyone with more than 7 cards had to ditch half (who can name the game?) and I toyed with everyone by showing my ability to count pretty much any number of cards in my hands that I wanted. After that they insisted on counting them themselves a few times till I promised to be good.

Day four I entertained with rubber band tricks, to make up for no tricks the preciding night, which I consider to be my strongest suit (I play with bands ALL THE TIME) lots of crazy mans handcuffs, joint venture, the descent, all good fun. I normally lead up to touch, but they'd already seen that. Plus I got to present them twice as my parents were on opposite ends of the barge at the time. As an aside I found whilst performing to coworkers a really nice way to lead up to touch is to treat teleportations and penetrations with increasing levels of restraint, starting with them holding the tips of fingers right to holding the whole finger, and then when you do touch explain that you want them to make sure the band in your palm can't move at all, which is a great motivator to get their hand pressed flush to yours, like its a challenge to stop it escaping or at least feel what you do to get it out.

Night four I did a little bit of professors nightmare.
Simple unequal to equal to two becoming one long, endless loop, re-division and finally tying the three together at equal lengths. Another one I've practised lots and requires very little audience participation. I want to extend this routine and I am totally buying fibre optics when I get back from Germany (I'm on a business trip in Germany by the way I had to fly out on the weekend before even going home from the canal. Odd to have a bag packed for a journey whilst already on one).

Night five I attempted to use a haunted key.
I haven't spent a lot of time mastering it but we stopped the boat and went to a supposedly haunted pub and my brain just yelled "Opportunity!" I told them I had a ghost detector.
Genuine spiritualism/mentalism is not something I am capable of pulling off, at least not around people who know me and know what a massive skeptic I am.
My dads reacion to the haunted key: "Let me have a go!"
We all spent the pre-evening-meal period taking turns at trying to be the most convincing psychic. Different kind of fun.

Final Night, Anniversary Waltz.
Not strictly the final night of the holiday but the reaction was so good I decided to use it as my final effect and leave them with an overall buzz. This year is the year of my parents ruby wedding annivrsary, so of course I wanted to perform the anniversary waltz. I was nervous as hell about this because the entire reason for doing magic on the boat was to leave them with this souvenir, and I really wanted it to go well.
Minor fluffs during this was one moment when I was so keen to hold a pinky break that I used my pinky, ring AND middle finger to keep the card up (I don't think anyone noticed bizarrely) and during the peel off I flashed what was supposedly their card but was quite clearly a court card (I like to use number cards, for tricks involving signing because they give a nice clear space to write in, especially low numbers) which detracted from the first part where it looks like the trick is essentially a two card ACR.
When I took their two cards out I put the deck down, which was ridiculously awkward as I then had to pick it up again before 'squaring' the cards and putting the DF between their hands.
As they held the card I asked them to repeat the following:
"I, yourname, Do solemnly swear"
"That when I see what is in between our hands"
"Will not take the * of my daughters magic lessons"
"And will treasure the result forever as an anniversary gift."

And the result... was astonishing. They looked at the card, turned it over, rubbed it with their fingers, asked if they would come apart.
"no, they're one card now. If you try to split them you'll realise that, but wreck it in the process" I told them.

The first time I was told about the end effect of the anniversary waltz, I immediately pondered how one could get specs to sign opposing faces of a DF without them realising. The next day however, my mother asked "but doesn't that trick last night ruin two cards? Its not a full deck anymore"
Ruin TWO cards. Thats when I realised it. Everything else I'd done they saw as manipulation or sleight of hand, or in the case of the key, a gimmicked prop. But for the first time ever I'd actually done something truly magical in their eyes. As far as they knew, those two cards really had fused somehow, maybe not in their hands but at some point during the routine.
I explained that a full deck of 52 cards is £2, so two cards are about 8p, plus not all effects need a full deck. And at the end I actually felt able to say "And by the way, it wasnt just a trick. It was magic."

And she agreed.

-Stacy

PS, does anyone know if you can buy a free standing double sided picture frame to mount AW final result cards in? My parents are in the market...

Hi Stacy. Hope you had a good holiday - it certainly seems to have been worthwhile magically.

I reckon a small acrylic block photo frame would be ideal for the AW souvenir card. A quick google found one at £9-ish.

isb

Good stuff. I'm still at the stage of trying to get my handling to a level where I'm happy to show it to family members. I was at a 40th birthday party last week and took a pack of cards in case the opportunity presented itself, but it didn't. Or I didn't create the opportunity.

Baby steps.

I think its really useful to have just one person to whom you can perform an effect or routine who won't care if it's terrible. Just because performing with any audience is a different beast to performing alone. They say all performers need somewhere to be c*** (not the best) so that they can get better.

I use my partner as a test audience which both irritates her and sometimes irritates me as if she knows the method (and often does) she will occasionally play the role of a heckler and see how I can retrieve a routine from attempts to derail it. She doesn't always reserve this activity for methods I'm confident with, so sometimes it can be a bit disheartening. I refused to perform anyting for her for a whole week last time she was that obstructive on my first attempt at a new handling.

It's all good though. Like I said, your family knows you and as such they'll know you don't have magic powers. Some of them will probably know you're learning magic and won't expect to be utterly amazed at everything you show them. And if they are, it's all the better and they got your performance for free. Can't really beat that!

-Stacy

I think the most important thing here is the courage you have shown, many people are terrified in messing up and would go into their shell after getting something wrong

The fact that you mentioned getting something wrong on the first night and still performing speaks volumes

I find now that every performance is a confidence builder, the first time I performed in front of my family I was shaking like a leaf, 8 people in the garden and I pulled the ID out, my sister told me her card and I rushed everything, just wanted it over and done with.

How things have changed a few months down the line, I'm now palming cards and misdirecting the Head of Operations at work, and despite only performing 7/8 card tricks at work, my nickname is now "Deanamo" (real name Dean) and people ask if I have anything new to show them. It feels good

It also means you do work harder at things because you want to get better and get a reaction next time round

Interesting what you say about your partner also, I have almost given up on my wife now, she HAS to know how everything is done, and what stop pestering until she knows, shes still bugging me about a Redemption routine I performed a fortnight ago

Well done for sharing.

My opinion, not that you asked for it really, is that you are trying to learn too much. Far, far too much.

Pick three tricks you love and JUST do them until they are perfect.

You won't listen to me, but in 10 years you might remember this post and realise I was right all along.

I love threads like this. Every time I perform an effect I learn something new about it ( usually a What Not To Do) and it''s great reading about others going through that same process. It's those little bits garned from raw experience that give us the most improvement.

Two Card Monte is what people commonly call Eddie Fechter's effect "Be Honest, What Is It?" . I think Mr Blaine popularised the renaming.

Rob

P.S. The game was Settlers Of Catan

Well done that woman. There's no substitute for feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

Mind you, the Pontcysyllte aqueduct REALLY frightens me. There's no rail on one side. That can't be right.

Re picture frames. http://www.muji.eu/pages/online.asp?Src=Y" target="_blank

Not quite sure why you got the spectator to riffle shuffle the deck on your OOTW. I perform the original version, so I'm not sure how your version works or what the set up is. It just seems to me that if you get the spectator to riffle shuffle with this trick then your set up is destroyed, and you'd have to do an angle separation or something. If you haven't performed it much, I wouldn't make things difficult on yourself by getting the spectators to shuffle first. Having said that, I don't know how the Galaxy version works, so maybe you can let them shuffle. Apologies if I've completely misunderstood your trick here.

The procedure in Galaxy is different. The riffle shuffle actually gets you into position to begin the effect.

As regards to Galaxy, if you can, perform a number of false cuts while you are talking to the spec 'prior' to beginning the effect. Don't draw attention to what you are doing but the action will stick in the specs mind. Once you have outlined the experiment, perform the riffle yourself and then do what you need to do as regards the cards.

Once you have laid out a red and a black, crack on as normal.

Once they have finished dealing I always mention I want to see how they did. I look and smile. (this allows me to confirm the state of the cards prior to the big reveal.

It's a wonderful routine and always gets a great reaction.

I really enjoyed reading your post. It really does go to show that the title you chose for this thread is correct. The art of blagging is a great tool until we know all that can go wrong and make adequate provisions.

Some may say that you shouldn't perform until you have each possible mistake covered but for me, that's just something the pro's need to worry about.

I also like that you are dipping your toes into each genre. It was mentioned above that you may be taking on too much too soon. Ignore that, try a little of everything and see what feels good, and what you enjoy performing.

Alec

Ah ok, apologies Stacy/The4thCircle. That sounds like an interesting version of OOTW, where did you learn it? A google search seems to suggest that it's from Paul Harris' Art of Astonishment - is that correct?

I wouldn't dwell too much on the performances that went slightly wrong. Remember the stuff that went well. Everyone makes mistakes.

Galaxy is in Art of Astonishment, but I was taught it on the Davenports intermediate magic course. I will one day own Art of Astonishment. I want to buy it myself but it's late enough in the year that I'm specifically not buying it to leave it open as a good solid Christmas gift. I like to make things easy for my friends and relatives like that.

As for the advice to perfect a small number of tricks, I couldn't agree more, but I'm still at a stage where I feel I need to figure out what those three tricks should be. I know one of the three will be a rope routine, because I'm a nut for topology and tangles. Fits my style perfectly.

I didn't intend to learn any card magic at all until I saw the Anniversary Waltz. Reason being that I've always felt that transformations are somehow more magical than transpositions or transportations. Losing and finding a card has always left me cold, no matter how well it's done, but the Anniversary Waltz has that extra edge of something changing in an usual way that really piques my interest. Knowing that trick exists makes me want to locate and incorporate other similar effects that end in previously unnoticed gaffs, especially if I can give them away at the end. I'm also spending a bit of time with Daniel Garcia's Torn, because again it's got that transformation impossibility that attracts me.

As for my third trick, I have no idea. The rubber band magic I use for impromptu situation and I now know enough to fill a few minutes confidently. I usually keep a few bands around my wrist for when I tell people I'm a magician, and it makes an impact, but it doesn't fill space. Works much better as a one on one thing.

I bought Morgan Strebler's Liquid Metal, thinking that metal bending filled all of my general requirements (transformative, close up, leaves a souvenir) but I bruised my hand just learning the moves and couldn't get past the third phase of the routine (corkscrew bend. The meat of my thumb hurts just thinking about it) my hand has since healed so I'll probably keep on trying it, hurting myself and resting to heal until I can do it. Until then I still need a solid 3rd trick.

I think right now though I'm still at a stage where I can do a whole lot of toe dipping.

-Stacy

Never let the spectator riffle shuffle unless you are sure that they will do it reasonably well. When Blaine did Galaxy on TV, I'd be willing to bet that he or the production team checked that the guy who shuffled could do it right beforehand. I tend to do the shuffle myself, and don't bother with any false cuts or false shuffles. If you shuffle nice and cleanly, all out in the open, that's good enough for most audiences. They won't know or care that it actually takes many shuffles to alter the order of a pack of cards significantly and the procedure means that, really, this is irrelevant anyway. Later on, try it the Kobain way and see if you prefer it, but I suggest you keep it simple and concentrate on getting the basic bits right for now.

I'm rather against metal bending as a trick. When I saw Banachek doing some of his metal bends live last year, he was so good it made me reconsider doing some PK work. If it had been, "Here's a card trick, here's some linking elastic bands, and now this fork has bent," I am not sure it would have been anything like as powerful.

Why not try the Ninja Rings, if you find elastic band work is too small? Lots of people have heard of, or half-remember seeing, the classic Chinese Linking Rings, so you have anticipation working in your favour. These tricks are classics for a reason.

Have you considered a paddle trick of some kind? Richard Osterlind has a version that uses something you can give away at the end, and it's a transformation trick (and/or transportation).