Always liking magic, but in the game actively for only a comparatively short time, I’ve met and run up against too many swell fellows and too, too many experts in their chosen profession to ever consider, for a moment, that I might possibly be called a magician and have it meant that way.
I really love the principles of magic… essentially the entertaining which must, of course, come first; and then all the little dodges that misdirect the people watching you for a giveaway gesture or step.
In the past three years I’ve joined magical clubs and societies; filled my spare drawers with all kinds of apparatus; and gone so far as to defy all fates by doing magic on my personal appearance tours. Few places on my route sheet found magicians absent.
All those guys took me up as one of them and did so many nice things that I’ve developed an inferior complex —- a fellow just can’t be accepted in inner circles until after he has taken many a fall, but the people who have professed or hobbied magic seem to pop up everywhere, and then turn out en masse for visiting magicians. In my case, I’m still trying to get someone honest enough to tell me the truth — good, or bad — followed by why and where.
After meeting and hobnobbing across the country with many of our cult and beliefs, my fault to find is that it’s difficult if not impossible to get constructive criticism, that is, if one gets criticism at all. In the picture business you get criticism from every one of the points on a compass. You listen to every bit, take what strikes you as being right, and hope that fate, or the producer, doesn’t override you. 99% of the magicians tell you that it’s all good and let you take the booking office bumps without warning.
I’d have been the happiest guy in the universe if I could have sat down now and dashed off an effect which might have revolutionized the art, but I’ll be damned if I can do it. My stuff is practically all “stock”.
However, and not that little egoistic angle so prevalent in magicians is about to come forth, there is an effect which seems to get its share of applause without restraint. It’s a cut and restored handkerchief trick built up from a base which one of the fraternity passed on.
The very, very, very few west coast critics I have tell me it’s the only such routine where the original handkerchief is apparently destroyed before it leaves anybody’s sight.
Get a nice looking metal bowl, something like the Lota Jar. Then get a smaller one, not as high, and solder it to the bottom of the larger one. The large bowl can be filled with water around outside of the smaller one inside. In the water you have a white pocket handkerchief, and on it are a lot of red strains, ordinary red ink will do. Also in the water is a small hank with stains on it and several holes cut through it.
Now take some phenolphthalein (any drugstore for this, and here is where I encroach on someone else’s principle) and mix it with an equal part of water. Pour just enough ammonia into this solution to make it a nice rich red, like ink. Keep it in a rubber corked bottle for when you want it.
Fill your fountain pen with this solution, have the tricky bowl prepared with water and hanks on your table, keep a sheet of newspaper nearby, and go to it.
Borrow a gentleman’s white pocket handkerchief and start to mark the corner of it with your pen. You want all to know later that it is the same one. Apparently the pen does not work, and, naturally, you shake it a time or two, which action serves to splatter the hank with red stains, the more the better.
You, as well as the owner and his sympathizers, are horrified. But you will wash out those stains with magical flucum. Dip it into the bowl, letting it go into the inside dry bowl, and come out squeezing the wet hank duplicate. The stains apparently have run all over the cloth when it is straightened out for all to see. This is your first laugh that’s real. The pen bit builds towards it. And by this time the audience is relaxed enough to appreciate the gag on the victim.
Now you offer a solution. Cut the stains out ! Pick up scissors and cut a spot or two out. Then dip it again, and come out, this time, with the smaller bit of cloth having the holes and stains. Excuse the mishap of shrinkage because of not using Lux.
This time you dip it back again, but leave it in the water and grab the dry hank (original) in center bowl. Your left hand comes up with sheet of newspaper and this crumpled handful is wrapped and balled into the sheet. The package is handed directly at once to the owner of the original handkerchief. He then opens and finds his own handkerchief in perfect condition as regards to its area and with nary a stain.
I held off telling you that by this time the chemical mishap spots have faded from the borrowed handkerchief and all is well. Though the chemical part is not original, the application makes possible what I’ve quoted before.
The destruction of the borrowed hank starts BEFORE it has left the sight of anyone. A thing like that should make people believe in you a little more than is usual.
That’s just about the best that I can pass on until I’ve become more of a veteran.
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