This Sunday on Magic Tonight

Coming up this week on Magic Tonight, we're delighted to have a truly legendary performer with us, Glenn Ottaway. At some point long back in the mists of time before I was born, Glenn began hosting a show in Toronto called A Little Night Magic, which ran for over ten years. Widely considered one of the greatest comedy Canadian comic writers, he is also a deviously gifted magician. This is a huge treat for us, so if you're free Sunday night, join us for a fantastic evening. Dinner begins at 6:00 PM with the show at 7:00. You can purchase tickets online ($25 or $45 with dinner). This show will be a real treat, one you don't want to miss!

Nov 16 Ottaway

See our performers schedule to see who will be on in the coming weeks. Readers of this blog can use the code secrets for an extra discount of the online advance tickets.

We've moved!

Our weekly show Magic@theCage has moved. Not far... we're exactly one door to the left of where we used to be; from 292 College to 294 College (click here for Google Map Directions if you need them). Since we're no longer technically @theCage, but merely next to The Cage or in the vicinity of The Cage we figured it was less confusing if we just updated everything. 

So now we are Magic Tonight. Same great show, same phenomenal guests. But we now have more seating capacity, a larger stage and an expanded dinner menu. The show still runs every Sunday at 7:00 PM with dinner served a 6:00 for anyone who's hungry.

Magic Tonight Poster Small

Our special guests for the inaugural performance are the lovely Matt DiSero (contributor of "Magic and Monkeys" in Seventeen Secrets Volume 2) and the distinguished Michael Close.

Tickets are available at www.abracadabaret.com/purchase-tickets. Readers here can use the code secrets for an extra special discount.

Not Quite Ironic

When I returned home from performing last night (at a wedding... with two brides... isn't the twentieth century awesome?) to find the latest issue of Genii Magazine in my mailbox.  This issue contains a trick I submitted to them for publication several months ago and it has appeared. No one told me exactly when it was going to appear, so it was quite a pleasant surprise to see it. Genii has been around for over seventy-five years and I'm surrounded by some rather illustrious company. It feels a bit like a high school student sneaking into a really cool college party.

The trick is called "Card Under Irony" which is a strange variation of the modern classic trick, "Card Under the Drink". Before it was published, there was spirited debate here in Toronto as to whether the trick should have been called "Card Under Irony" or "Card Under Foreshadowing". Eventually it was decided both were equally appropriate and equally confusing so we flipped a coin.

It shows up on p44 in the Magicana column, edited by Andi Gladwin.

One small correction: somehow Photo 5 got inverted. So when you get to that part of the description, it's best to do a head stand to view the photo. Otherwise when you try to learn the trick you'll be confused when you're required to magically teleport a card from the left to the right side of the table.

One large correction: those hands aren't mine! Really the wedding ring should give that away. I'm still quite single and will happily accept suitors who enjoy card tricks.

If you don't already subscribe to Genii, you can do so here.

Sweaty Thursday Afternoon

Last Thursday, it was hot... really hot... and I was ridiculously overdressed. But indoors it was much cooler at the Houses of Providence where I was performing for Magicana's Senior Sorcery program. They shares some photos on their Facebook page: 

After the performance, I was treated to a recitation of some of the most amusing dirty limericks I've ever heard (proof that age brings wit and wisdom.

You can support Magicana and their community outreach programs for children and seniors here. 

Shared Uncertainty (Part 2)

I'm slowly getting a chance to dig through the video from The Uncertainty Project back in June. Here is the next part

For those who are curious, this is a blend of material from The Vernon Chronicles Volume 1 (Stephen Minch, L&L Publishing, 1987), Vortex (Tom Stone, Hermetic Press, 2010) and Tricks (David Ben, Squash Publishing, 2003).

I hope more will follow soon but we have a lot of video (every night, with multiple cameras for some nights) and the files are huge and a pain to work with.

James Alan Uncertainty Project Poster

Repetition

The clever folks at TED-Ed point out something interesting: 

There is a rule in magic, taught religiously to new magicians which goes something like this:

Never repeat the same trick twice for the same audience.

In its simplest for, it appears to be wonderful advice. Only showing a piece of magic once keeps the secret safe since everyone has fewer opportunities to try and work out how it's done and you retain the element of surprise.

There's another school of thought that embraces repetition with escalation. That is, you can do the same trick over and over again, but with each repetition you should raise the stakes, or incorporate extra wrinkles and twists. This is much like the famed Dueling Banjo's scene from Deliverance...

This is the version I was first exposed to as a young child in a Warner Brothers cartoon.

However, in university, I became aware of a strange phenomenon in children's television with Blue's Clues. At one point they would take an episode and air it on Monday. Then on Tuesday, in the same time slot, they aired the exact same episode. And continued for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. And they did some rather interesting research on the young children watching it. It turns out, the more times they had seen the episode, the more they payed attention and the more interested they were on subsequent viewings. This runs completely counter to what our intuition says should happen; we ought to be bored watching the same program over and over again.

Of course, this matches up with my own youth. It would be difficult to count the number of times I've watched the original Star Wars trilogy or Ace Ventura. And when we were in elementary and middle school, we would watch syndicated episodes of The Simpsons until we could recite the most profound scenes from memory... Dental plan... Lisa needs braces...

I had the opportunity to run an experiment fairly recently. Due to some miscommunication, I was trapped with a group of children who were far too young (I typically try my best not to ever perform for anyone under seven years old for reasons I've explained before) for far too long. There was one piece which I learn from Eugene Burger's Mastering the Art of Magic which has always been dependable for me with children. It's fun, appropriately absurd and silly, and gets several people involved.

Unfortunately, several people wasn't enough. So to increase my interaction, I took a single segment from the middle of the trick, and started doing it over and over again, once for each child. I did it over and over again, word-for-word the same, passing form one child to the next like an assembly line. Every one was happy to get their turn, and there was no sense at all that this was "getting old". Because I was confused and bewildered, I kept going. I made it to nine times, repeating the same phase of a trick and finally moved on. I know I could have continued but I was bored myself.

Now, I don't want to repeat myself that much on a regular basis, but it was an interesting learning experience to find out that maybe repetition fundamentally isn't that bad.