Went to a pub to see an old friend, who already was there with a friend I didnt yet know. As usual, my friend was already abit toxicated and started bragging how great magician I was and demanded me to show some tricks to his friend.
I wasnt done any magic for few weeks so I felt a bit unprepared, but thought I give it a shot. Performance to real people is the key to really master this art in the long run, as you sure agree.
I had only one red bicycle-deck with me (ungimmicked), so I started with "memory trick" (not sure of the real name), the trick where using DL the spectator thinks he knows in which order the 2 cards are on his hand, but the huge finish is that when he looks at the cards they BOTH are different cards than in the beginning. I'm sure most of you know the trick.
The problem was, the deck was quite old and DL was going to be a bitch, so I focused too much on the cards, and he got a peek of the first switched card. You all know how that feels, after you have assured that he must not look at the cards cause the whole idea of the game is him to try to figure out in which order the two cards are, and he still looks. I usually am prepared of that with my fast hands, but this time I put a little too much focus on the old bendy cards to do a decent DL.
Well that trick failed, and it was kind of awkward, mainly to my friend though, as I am very aware that sometimes tricks just go wrong and theres not much you can do about it. I never been an "exit"-guy, to fail occasionally is just human and I dont want to display myself as supernatural. Besides I like to think that the shame is a good way to learn from mistakes.
Ok, I just thought, lets move to next trick, people will forget.
Next up I did card-to wallet with improvised mentalism-twist, and that one really blew them off.
The usual "You are SATAN! BURN THE WITCH" comments were made and I got some confidence to perform my new self-invented trick that I had never tried before.
Spectator picked a card, memorized it, lost the card in the deck and shuffled it. A bit more mentalism/NLP-BS-preparing (yes at times I like to be very, I mean VERY poor man's Derren Brownish type of magician), and I said that as he already knows, I'm a magician and there would be no point for me to reveal his card anymore, as I did it before with the card found to be on my sealed wallet.
I gave my mobile to him and asked him to pick ANY number from the phone, call the number, and explain that we are doing a magic trick and he would like the answerer to just name ANY playing card he/she pleases.
The look on the specs face when the person at the other end named the card HE choosed earlier, was, lets say, priceless.
After that he didnt know if he was gonna beat me up or hug me. The bodylanguage was very confusing, i can tell, at least with my DB-skills!
Dont you just love to use quite easy tricks and boost the already good effect to maximum with set-ups and good patter/build-up?
This topic could also serve as a place for anecdotes and short diary-type of posts of what is like to be a magician. I'm sure these stories are interesting and entertaining to most of us, not sure about the laymen
