katrielalex wrote: teaching a muggle
This is going to confuse the issue, but what I find a lot harder is when they aren't
entirely a muggle. I was visiting a friend recently, and it seems he's got into magic. For the people at the table, he did the TT silk vanish, and a coin through a bottle, and a trick with a Sven deck, and a version of OOTW that he very nearly got right. He wasn't
bad, massively, but he wasn't good - for one thing, his puppyish excitement led him to do some tricks again and again until, inevitably, the watchers figured them out. Later, he eagerly (and pointlessly) showed me his gimmicks and how things were done and (depressingly - well, it depressed me) waved a copy of Fulves Mental Miracles and asked if I'd seen it.
Now, I'm no master - not by a long shot - but I've put rather a lot of time and effort into being pretty good, within limits, and it's paid off. He asked me to show him a trick and it's boomingly implicit that he'll want me to show him the method afterwards. I mean, we're both magicians, right? And he's happily, unasked, showed me all his secrets. What do you do? Partly there's the (my) gut feeling that you should, sort of, 'earn' the right to the cream (and he
already had OOTW in his pocket), through committment. But also there's the practical situation that I suspect anything I show him he'll reveal to pure blood muggles - accidentally, but doing it repeatedly, not very well, without enough practise. Socially, however, it's an awkwards situation.
(Oh, BTW, I noticed he'd got Sadowitz's DVD. He said he hadn't watched it yet. The Piano Trick is on that DVD, so I showed him that - it baffled him. He was going to see how it was done anyway, so I had nothing to lose. Good old Piano Trick: what
would I do without you?)