Our December meeting had a light turnout but the small group shared a lot of ideas from good local performing venues to stories about dealing with pre-performance jitters. Our theme was “liar, liar, pants on fire,” and we saw magic with false counts, multiple outs, and just plain lying.
Tom Payne shared card preparation secrets on how to split, powder and scrape cards. Danny Dragon amazed us with his version of a John Bannon effect called Royal Scam where cards magically flipped over and changed their back designs. Michael Jacobs wowed us with a deck of jumbo cards where every card had been cut in half. Two spectators each chose a half of a card from the deck and they ended up being a perfect match.
Mark Paulson gave us a brief history of the evolution of Tarot cards into modern day playing cards. He then proceeded to have a spectator think of any favorite date in the calendar. The date was looked up in a calendar that had a different card marked on each date. Mark not only had a sole matching card in an envelope, but he had the spectator count the cards in a deck that had been on the table the entire time and there were only 51 cards and the prediction was the only one missing. Mark’s routine was based on Chronologue by Bob Cassidy. Keeping with the theme of the night, Chuck Kleiner performed a variation of Banachek’s Ring of Truth where he identified who was telling the truth and who was lying. Ric Ruidl gave us some deep thoughts on the number four and then wrapped up the meeting with a nice presentation of Nick Trost’s Four Flush where seven four of spades turned blank and then reprinted magically.
We all learned something new which made for an excellent meeting. And that’s no lie.