Every time we’ve turned around this week someone has told us he was building the cabinet for the SEFALALJIA routine from last issue. Incidentally, and phonetically, the word means a high class headache. And coincidentally (?) when the C was changed to S and the G to J, the letters stood for Stewart James! And Dr. Vosburgh Lyons has revamped FINGER FINGER (#65) into a thing of beauty by having the two spectators stand back to back, sides to the audience. Thus neither can see how many fingers the other holds out and anyone else in the audience steps back to the performer each time and whispers the total. The assistants know nothing about what is going on until the performer calls the results each time. But we know, don’t we ?
The Dunninger program in this issue should make many a performer sit down and think a bit. He commands the highest prices obtainable today for a one-man mystery act. He goes to any length to keep magicians from catching his show, not because he has anything so startingly new but because his presentation is decidedly different. Where other magicians entertain the people who say “He’s very clever, isn’t he ?”, Dunninger makes audiences believe in him and remark “He’s wonderful.”
No sooner do we get Dante’s Sim Sala Bim show title figured out but we find that Edgar Benyon, of England, has a Novelty Magical Revue ready for the war’s end called Bam-Boo-Zalem. If these be words from another drinking song (like Dante’s) we’ll have to leave early. — Scoop ! 3500 years ago, around 1500 B.C. tips for the fingers and thumbs were beaten out of gold in perfect replica. They were used on dead digits to protect the nails from the mummifying process. Some of these magical necessaries are on display at N.Y.’s Museum of Natural History. Some magi today had better stay away from finger and thumb tips or risk being mummified on sight.
Buffalo’s (N.Y.) Evening News has an annual campaign for the city’s 50 neediest. The I.B.M. Ring put on a show this year and obtained a donated theatre. 50% of the take paid off the orchestra, stagehands, and petty costs. The rest went to the fund. The newspaper plugged magic to the sky, and Ralph Hinkson, chief newsphoto scooper (and an I.B.M.’er) wrangled many a press photo past the city desk. The paper’s radio station did its part and Bob Weill, whose brain wave it was, is now lining up periodical charity shows from which the I.B.M., as well as its Ring #12, will garner much good will from people who never heard of magic.
Wallace Lee lives in Durham, N.C. So does the well known Dr. J.B. Rhine of Duke University. We learn from the former that the latter is far from being “washed up” in ESP matters. Another book will be published in February to supplement New Frontiers of the Mind. The tome will cover sixty years of research into the mind for evidence of telepathy and include all the criticisms (there have been plenty ! Ed.) and an attempt made to answer each. 7 main critics have been approached to make comments from the proofs and these will be included word for word. Dr. Rhine evidently feels certain that after his 6 years of testing he has irrefutable evidence of “en rapport” between minds.
I first saw Albenice do what is called The Arabian Bead Mystery in a little Broadway nite club. I had neither seen nor heard of it before then. Later it was marketed over his name. Then the critics and reviewers made a to do about it being old and not original. Bob Weill and Sid Lorraine, both avid researchers, mentioned The Magic Wand and a Mr. Ramsey. We talked to both Albenice and U.F. Grant, the manufacturer. We checked the old article with the new trick. Albenice had read it and liked it in effect but not entirely in method. He corrected the defects. The original version did not allow of both ends of the necklace being shown because one end was not in straight formation. When the string was cut there was no dropping as of loose beads as one would expect. And the cut thread, presumably stripped of beads, remaining in the performer’s hand, could not be shown from both ends.
Albenice eliminated every one of these bad points, put the trick in his show, and at once the magicians who saw it wanted it. He feels that he’s made a practical trick of a basic idea, at least a marketable trick which everybody had passed up. My sole comment is that I would like to see the reviewers and dissenters ACTUALLY DO the trick EXACTLY as was devised by Ramsey. Then they should ACTUALLY DO the trick EXACTLY as devised by Albenice. I would but want to watch their facial expressions.
All of which brings us back to a phase of the reviewer problem mentioned last issue. Every 10 or 12 years brings in a new “crop” of magically minded people, a new generation. Exactly as in the past, and undoubtedly like in the future, the demand is for tricks, tricks, tricks, and not more than 2% of the devotees show any interest in the history of magic or what has gone before. “What’s NEW ?” is the cry. Tell them about material in old books and magazines and they get a glazed look. SHOW them a trick without telling its date of origination and they immediately clamor for it. Print such a trick and the reviewers, who steep themselves in the lore of ages, to which present day fans have little access, shout “old stuff”, “just a rehash”. Whether these comments tend to hurt sales I won’t take the chance of saying. It certainly can’t help and assuredly the reviewers should take time to be certain (1) that there is no new and modern improvement to the effect, (2) that credit hasn’t been given to the originator of the effect, before going overboard in their condemnation, generally to the extent that they forget to review the trick’s possibilities regardless of age.
If any of the commentators ever have started doing a trick after some professional dug it up out of near oblivion, some trick they undoubtedly would have called “old” and in their calling certainly must have known about it but passed it by, they’ll perhaps understand what I’ve been trying to say.
Next week, to outdo Percy Abbott’s photo of a levitation over a dinner table surrounded by guests we’ll republish a genuine picture of a hindu actually suspended from the ground supported only by a single rope from below. It is no fake.