2010-05 Dennis' Deliberations

famulus [ˈfæmjʊləs] n. pl. fam·u·li (-l) from the Latin

1. A private secretary or other close attendant.

I have been doing a long term assignment as a fill-in teacher in a local public high school teaching Latin! I am not sure if most of you in Ring 170 know what the name of our newsletter means in Latin, so I put it at the beginning of this column rather than my typical epigraph.

I really regretted not being with you at the Auction this year. The Ring 170 Auction and Banquet were something that I looked forward to every year. Up here in Harrisonburg, VA, I am a little closer to DC and Baltimore so I do have a chance to make the 90 minute drive to the Metro subway link in Vienna, VA and ride into the special events at Ring 50, the Washington, DC Capital Ring. I will go to DC in June to see the Rich Bloch one-man-show.  I do not like driving in Washington traffic. Cars with diplomatic immunity plates ignore traffic laws, the constant marches and protestors believe that they are on a mission from God and immune to automobile traffic and there is no place to park a car. I either ride with others or drive to the fringe edge of the subway and pay the 5 to 8 dollars for a one-day pass and ride the Metro anywhere I want. Dulles Airport is in Virginia and can be approached without the traffic hassles. Cindy my wife flew back to Orlando for a few days to be with our grown kids and I took her there to catch the Jet Blue aluminum bird.

Art Thomas, was on the look-out for me at the recent Auction and snagged a small item that he said he believed that I could use.  Thanks Art!  It was a clever Sharpie Pen with a shiner built in!  For those of you not into all the techniques of mentalism, a shiner is a mirror reflecting device. It can be a small trip of silver Mylar or a small convex mirror. I believe that Bev Bergeron once showed us how to use a shinny dinner spoon as a shiner to get a glimpse of a playing card.  A shiner is something that anyone doing mentalism or card tricks should be intimately aware of!

Remember Petrick and Mia when they lectured for our Ring?  He had a small Mylar shiner glued to the outside bottom flap of a card box. He would take out the cards and have someone shuffle them and then he would take them back and stand them up on the table with the face of the deck to the audience and one by one peel them off and name them. He could not see the faces!  What he did was to lay the card case down towards the front of the table where he was propping up the deck on a coffee cup. The bottom of the card box with the shiner was laying in front of the propped up deck and facing him so all he was doing was looking at the reflection of the bottom of the deck indix through the shiner.   In his lecture he repeated the trick without the shiner on the box!  This time a sticky Mylar circle was on his thumbnail! He had his curled hand innocently lying on the table so he could see the reflection of the card indexes! He sold these in his lecture kit. I bought the kit.   You can buy self-stick mirror Mylar in the auto trim section of Auto Zone or any discount auto chain store.

I do an idea that I got from Mark Salem. It was on his “Mind Games” TV special that played in the late 90s on Pax TV.  

Invite up 5 people to help.  Give them each a magic marker and a poster board about 12 by 18 inches. They are to draw any simple cartoon object.  Each card is collected without you seeing it and you shuffle the pile face down and one by one.  With lots of by play, you hold up each card in front of the spectator and then match it to the spectator that drew it.  BUT when you get to the last card (which you have not seen) you say, “Obviously, you drew this card which I have not seen yet. Here, take it back and hold it facing you so I can not see it and let me see if I can get a mental impression of what you drew.”  You then try to reveal what the spectator drew. You seem to have trouble so you take your finger tips and hold them against her temples to tap into the brainwaves.  You then reveal the drawing!   

Secret: All the cards are secretly marked in an Annemann “pseudo-psychometry” method. (I use wax: use block paraffin wax and make dots according to the number of volunteers in the row. Put these large on the sides of the cards by rubbing it with the wax block. Often a good white candle will do the same thing. You can feel the dots as you manipulate the cards. The volunteers are clueless.)

On the last one you use a “shiner” in your palm so that when you hold your finger tips to the spectator’s head, you are looking at the reflection in your palm!  

I make my own shiner for this out of a small round 2 inch convex mirror that you stick onto your car mirror. You can pick them up for $2 at Walgreens.  Tear off the plastic housing until you have just the plastic convex mirror. Then I use a belt sander and sand off a bit of the tip and bottom until I have a convex shiner that is basically rectangular and easy to palm.   Packs flat, plays big and fills the stage.  This was on Mark Salem’s TV special about 10 years ago .He had many other standard mentalist things but he did a very good job of connecting with the audience. I have been doing this effect for years!

Another idea in this “Mostly All Tricks” edition:

You have to love Jay Sankey. I respect his huckstering ability as much as I do his magic. He could sell refrigerators to Eskimos and space heaters to Amazon natives.

He has the ability to take an old idea or a simple method and transform it into a walk-around miracle. Check this out: http://www.sankeymagic.com/detail.aspx?ID=48208

I have been doing this effect for years because I love sleeve pulls. Here is how I did it!

I took a medical tongue depressor (also available in the craft section at Michael’s Crafts), drilled a hole in the end and attached a black elastic cord.(available at Joanne’s ETC.)  I run the black elastic cord up my sleeve and safety pin the end of the elastic up around my arm pit. 

To do the trick:  In private, I reach into my sleeve and pull out the depressor and fold over the bill and put the tongue depressor inside it!  

Do the floating bit and just un-pinch the end of the bill and the depressor flies up your sleeve and you are clean!

No monthly writing of mine is finished without my rant.

Here are some of my problems with my magic:

1. Being able to do a perfect one-handed table faro with dog-eared cards, blindfolded and out in the rain, and having no one to show it to.

2. Listening to my medical doctor asking me how Criss Angel cuts a person in two and the halves crawl away... and not being able to give him a clever answer. And then thinking of three zinger come-backs -- after I've left his office!

3. Hearing some adult say to me with a smile, "I used to do magic as a kid, but I outgrew it."

4. Coming across a hard-sell advertising hustle by a magician who looks like shaving his face is still a novelty, on how we can all become millionaires doing restaurant magic -- just like him!

5. A wealthy suburban parent at their kid’s birthday party handing me a check without my name on it because they were too lazy to even bother to remember my name.

6. A wealthy suburban parent asking on a $200 birthday party show, "Ah, how much was it?" because they're too rich and consequently too disinterested to remember what I told them on the phone just three days previously.

7. A wealthy suburban parent asking on a $200 birthday party show, "How much was it?" and I have to fight the urge to say, "Five hundred bucks!" Or: "Two hundred dollars without the gratuity."

8. A client who "nickel and dimes" me, trying to force me to a rock-bottom price, and when I get to the venue there's 2,000 people, a live band, a couple of clowns making balloon doggies, a ventriloquist, two large rented air-filled bouncing tents, a roving petting zoo, a professional Santa Claus, a mountain of presents, and enough food to feed the entire American military in Iraq for a week.

9. A snotty kid shouting back, "GET ON WITH IT!" when I try to tell them about my travels to India looking for the fabled Indian Rope Trick.

10. A charity bozo trying to get me to donate my entertainment services for free, saying "It'll be excellent publicity for you." I have to fight the urge to say, “Publicity that I do FREE shows? No thanks!”

11. A kid who grabs my rope, pokes at the doves behind him, and kicks me in the leg while the watching parents remain totally oblivious that they have been smitten with the ignoble job of being ... parents.

12. A pinhead going for the cheap laughs by asking me if I can make his wife disappear, when I'd like to make HIM disappear. 

13. A magic dealer saying there's no sleight of hand, magnets, threads, mirrors, black art, or sleeving involved, and I buy the trick and find out it uses spit and magician's wax.

14. A check that bounces a week later, and when I contact to the woman who gave it to me, she says, "My ex-husband said that check was good! Run it through again and if it bounces I will find a credit card to give you"

15. A dozen phone calls a year from idiots asking me if I'll take credit cards, empty beer bottles, or their first-born as payment. (Okay, I made up the last two.)

16. A drunk who calls me in the middle of the night and wants a dirty magic show for his buddies and their girlfriends, "just like that comedy-club magic guy did in Vegas".

17. Chinese, East-Indian or eastern European folks good-naturedly insisting I stay after my show and have some of their food, which I can smell is loaded with curry and looks like something like the mass murder scene in a grade-B horror movie.

There has to be more to the life of a struggling small-town magician other than just the self-induced humiliation of having to entertain a bunch of noisy heckling kids with a set of Hippity Hop Rabbits.

I just wrapped up producing the magic opening for the musical Pippin at the local Blue Ridge Community College. I did much the same thing that I did when I helped with the play at UCF a few years ago. Pippin is a musical about the son of Charlemagne who goes off seeking the meaning of life and seems unable to find it. It is a type of Bildungsroman. At the very beginning is a musical and dance number called, “We’ve got magic to do!”  I provided the Flying Carpet just like they used on Broadway when Ben Vereen did it. I also provided a Dancing Cane, a floating chalice (my own design), appearing rabbit box and I designed the Modern Cabinet for the finale scene.

My weekly two-night gig at the local Hookah Lounge seems to be taking off. The tips are rising and the lounge is getting repeat business with people coming back with their friends. I have upped the size of my act now to include Bob Sheet’s “Hang ‘em High” rope-through-body.  I always looked askew at restaurant workers but my ideas have changed.  The Hookah Lounge seems to be ideal to expand and mesh with magic. The owners are happy. My only downside is the smoke.  Don’t you all run at once, but if I was in Orlando, I would go looking for a walk-around gig at any of your local Hookah Lounges.

The flowers are blooming. The Dandelions have taken over my lawn. Springtime in the Shenandoah Valley is beautiful.

Dennis Phillips