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The
TRICK
BRAIN

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

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Tricks in the tenth classification, sympathetic reactions or responses, seem to have no characteristic ultimate common climaxes except for the sympathetic implication. Often the final effects of different tricks are extremely divergent. Examination of two random examples will illustrate this.

In The Sympathetic Silks the general effect is that two sets, of three silk squares each, seem to have an affinity, one for the other. Whatever is done to one set in the way of tying and untying the other set seems to respond automatically through some mysterious relationship. When the three pieces of one set are tied together, the pieces of the opposite set are found tied similarly. When the first set is untied, the second one becomes separate. Tied together in a different arrangement, the first set seems to cause the second one to become similarly arranged.

As is well known, when the six silks are apparently shown separate in the beginning, actually three of them are tied. Utilizing one of several expedients covers this. Most commonly, substitution is employed. Two separate silks are counted off, after which the two separate ones are switched for three that are connected, in the act of apparently picking up the third silk. The tied silks are laid aside as three separate ones. When the three silks in the opposite set are tied, those laid aside are shown to be connected. But the knots in the originally connected set are slipknots and the original set is secretly separated as it is put down again. So they are in position to be shown separated when the opposite set is untied again.

Frequently a further step is taken. One set is tied together by bringing the corners of all three silks into a single knot. But as the opposite set is being shown separate in the preceding section of the trick, a small rubber band is slipped around the collected single corners of the set, causing them to appear to be tied together in a single knot when they are revealed in the third section. Of course, the rubber band is slipped off at the final stage when the first set is again separated.

This trick has many different routines and many different variations, depending upon the individual performer's interpretation.

Now let's look at You Do As I Do. Here, each using different decks, two people, the performer and a spectator, ultimately seem to select identical cards simultaneously. There are many methods of performing this. But the original method rests upon getting the identity of the spectator's card by means of a key card. Each looks at his respective card and replaces it in his respective deck. However, this is merely a maneuver as far as the performer is concerned. It permits him to contrive to have the spectator's card just below the key card in the spectator's deck. The magician actually does not determine his card until both people have exchanged decks. Then he selects the card chosen by the spectator. Of course, the spectator selects the same card from the magician's deck the second time.

As a matter of fact, the method used in this trick is actually that the magician delays making a selection until after the spectator has made his. Then the magician merely selects the one chosen by the spectator. In actual fact, the spectator really looks up both cards while the magician does little else but wait patiently.

If careful consideration is given to the nature of the two examples, the sympathetic silks and the you-do-as-I-do, it will be seen that the ultimate effects, except for the sympathetic interpretation, belong in two different categories. The silk trick is an implied animation while the card trick is the discovery of an identity. The Mora Wands or the Petrie-Lewis version, The Cords of Cairo, are sympathetic animations.

Max Malini used to perform a trick in which ten or twelve people selected cards from ten or twelve decks, each person taking a card from a different deck. At the climax, all were found to have selected the same card. This, of course, was an identity effect, accomplished through forcing, and camouflaged as a sympathy trick.

Remote Control, Annemann's trick in which the spectator selects, apparently, the only card placed in the deck by the performer, actually is a prediction trick interpreted as one of sympathy.

Thus, investigation discloses that the sympathetic effect is merely one of interpretation. Stating this in another way: Effects in the other general categories, such as animations or identity discoveries, are simply distorted in such a manner that when performed simultaneously, two or more separate effects being performed parallel, there seems to be some type of sympathetic reaction or response between the objects used. Actually, then, the sympathetic tricks are combinations of more basic effects.

If this is the case, there can be sympathetic productions. Well, why not? Two identical production boxes could seem to materialize identical objects. There can be sympathetic vanishes as well. And sympathetic transpositions, transformations, penetrations, restorations, levitations, attractions, spectator failures, control, identifications, thought readings, thought transmissions, predictions or suitable combinations.

Let's give this idea some thought.

There need not necessarily be two tricks. One trick will do. The motivating part, that which seems to cause the sympathetic reaction, may be accomplished through perfectly natural means.

As an example of a possible effect: Two candles are side by side on one table with a duplicate pair on another. The performer applies a match to one candle on the table behind which he is standing. The corresponding candle on the opposite table becomes lighted mysteriously. The flame is transferred to the second candle at the performer's table and the first is blown out. The flame changes candles on the opposite table. The performer lights both candles. Both become lighted on the unattended table. The performer lowers a colored gelatin cylinder around the candle at his table. This makes the flame seem to be blue. The flame on the opposite table turns blue.

This effect could be accomplished by means of a sliding inner section built into the candles—really metal tubes painted to look like candles—in the responding pair. The color change could be accomplished by impregnating the wick on the trick candles with the proper chemicals. Or a second sliding section, which burns with a blue flame all the time, could come up in place of the yellow flame.

Another effect: The performer places a saucer over a mouth up tumbler. He places a half-dollar on top of the saucer. On the opposite side of the stage he arranges a similar tumbler with a similar saucer. The performer apparently causes another half-dollar to penetrate mysteriously through his saucer, falling into the tumbler below with an audible clink. The coin placed in the first saucer seems to penetrate it and fall into its tumbler sympathetically.

Cards: Two decks are shown. The Queen of Hearts is taken from the red-backed deck and placed in the blue-backed one. Sympathetically, the Queen of Hearts from the blue-backed deck mysteriously takes its place in the red-backed deck.

Or the spectator selects any card from the red deck. It is placed in the blue deck. Upon examining the red deck the identical card, except with a blue back, is found in its place. The blue-back card corresponding to the selected card is found to be missing in the blue deck.

Or a card is selected from the blue deck and torn in two. The identical card is found to be similarly torn in the red deck. The card is mysteriously restored. A corresponding restoration is found in the blue deck.

A card is freely selected from the red deck and reversed. The corresponding card is found reversed in the blue deck. The Brain Wave Deck could supply a possible method of accomplishing this.

Two card tricks of the pick-it-out variety may be worked simultaneously, with both spectators missing the card desired but getting identical wrong cards each time they try.

The hand of a clock on one side of the stage is moved to a desired or called hour. The hand on the clock at the opposite side of the stage moves to a corresponding position.

A spectator may write a prediction of the card another spectator will select. Or he may transfer a thought to another spectator. Or duplicate a drawing that the other spectator makes simultaneously.

Well, now, why should there be so few sympathy tricks? Here, with just a bit of thinking around the subject, we have kicked down the doors to admit a whole plague of sympathetic response tricks; Productions, Vanishes, Transpositions, Transformations, Penetrations, Restorations, Spectator failures, even predictions and thought transferences. And. like Frakson's cigarettes, the plots are plucked from thin air at random.

Methods? Surely, by now you are not worrying about such a foolishly simple thing as finding methods by which these tricks may be accomplished. Why, all of the work that has gone before in this patient search through tricks and tricks has been done with the sole purpose of removing the mask from this over-emphasized how-it-is-done bogey. Magic would have perished by the boards decades ago if it did not actually rest upon something much more tangible than the simple mechanical aspects.

How can our crude levitations with crooked pieces of iron and threads live in a day when multi-ton planes take trips for thousands of miles? How can the creations from our production boxes, hauled out bodily, wrinkled and bedraggled, continue to exist in the presence of the genuinely magical creations from the chemists' test tubes?

How can the thought transference trick which bridges but a mere few feet compete with the thought that travels around the world in a fraction of a second? The tapping telegraph key outdid The Rapping Hand years ago. The identifications performed by any first class criminal investigation bureau far surpass those magicians so laboriously essay. The mind reading feats of the trained psychologists, not the phony psychology of what we call "mentalists"(!), and psychiatrists are far ahead of anything our blundering, bluffing and guessing professional mind readers can accomplish.

But if you still insist on methods, I can suggest a few possibilities for the tricks that we have just evolved.

The Queen of Hearts transposition could be accomplished by means of a little magician's wax smeared on the face of the red-backed Queen when it is placed in the deck immediately behind the blue-backed one. And the duplicate blue one could come from between to indifferent red cards, having been hidden there also by means of a bit of adhesive on either of its sides. Or if you prefer to use just your hands, a bit of skillful palming will work wonders.

Duplicate cards, a bit of wax and a bit of maneuvering would make the any-card-selected trick possible. Or, again, proper and dexterous palming.

The torn card trick could be accomplished through a bit of forcing, combined with the planting of a torn duplicate in the deck of opposite colored backs.

The two-spectator prediction trick is possible with a bit of forcing after having stolen a glimpse of the first spectator's prediction.

Now don't tell me the others are tougher and that I'm stumped just because I don't make suggestions for all of them. Because if you do, then I'll pick out the meanest one of them all, the one where one spectator transfers a thought to another spectator. You see, one of those spectators is a plant. He is the one doing the "transferring" to the other. So whatever the other says, even if its a case of using a thumb-writer to prove it, the first verifies it as the thought he was transferring. If you don't like that method, figure out another.

I must insist that method—I mean mechanical method—is not important. It makes little difference which diminishing card method you do—and as you will recall, there are lots of them. The important thing is what you put with the method in the way of mental energy.

Here are some more suggestions for sympathetic response effects:

A miniature drawing is duplicated simultaneously in some mysterious manner. A silk becomes decorated by remote control. A sympathetic object visibly duplicates the movements of another object. When a card is taken from one deck, another deck cuts itself mysteriously at the same card. The lighting of a match seems to control the illumination of an insulated light globe. (Let's hope that the spectators do not think of the electric eye while you're doing it, or this will seem paltry.) Two books are opened simultaneously by two different spectators, and they are found to be opened at the same pages. Two people write or draw the same design simultaneously. Two people simultaneously pluck the same cards from decks in their pockets.

But don't put too much stress on the trick itself as a mystery. Your customers might suddenly think of television, which is much more miraculous. Stress it in terms of human interests, of human relationships, of character response, of human situations.

If the mystery were important, the much greater miracles of our everyday world would far out-shadow it. Method is important only as a means of accomplishing a desired end, like the grindstone that sharpens the headsman's axe. The ultimate objective is something entirely different. <-|!*!|C|I|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14|15|16|17|18|19|20|21|22|23|24|25|26|27|28|29|30|31|32|33|34|35|->
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