A Magician’s Nightmare
What is a nightmare for a magician? Performing to a room full of magicians? Well, yes, but almost as bad is someone who appears to know exactly what you are doing when you are performing to them - by that I mean the method used to accomplish the magic. This happened to me at the weekend.
Sometimes people guess a method and get it partly right. Some people just need an explanation, whether it’s right or wrong, which is fine. But this was really disturbing, this person was getting everything spot on.
Magicians reading this will probably think that means I wasn’t performing very well - there should be no way anyone could see the moves used to achieve a magical effect. But you don’t need to see moves to know they are there, or work out out what they might be. Magicians do this all the time when watching other (good) magicians. They know how a magical effect is achieved even without being able to actually see the moves - they fill in the gaps because their minds work in the right way.
The problem was this wasn’t another magician, it was a very perceptive 11 year old girl! Luckily, what I was doing was still flying by everyone with her - I don’t think they believed her when she managed to work out and describe exactly what I was doing.
How do you cope with this? Confusion.
I was into the next effect before she’d finished saying “But didn’t you just swap those two over and ….”. It became pretty comical, although I must admit I wasn’t laughing on the inside!
October 9th, 2006 at 8:58 pm
So are you going to share what the effect was ?? Don’t worry - it’s happened to me too.
Dave Hawkins
October 10th, 2006 at 2:38 pm
Hi Dave,
It was Crazy Man’s Handcuffs and then my single coin routine - but I don’t think anyone knew what was going on by then, I was going so fast!