Wednesday, April 22, 2015

What happened at the meeting on Friday 17th April 2015


The theme for the night was “Close-up Magic”, hosted by John Ferguson.  He started by placing a caterpillar silk into a small empty metal can and closing the can.  On opening it, the caterpillar silk had changed into a large butterfly silk.  (The Switch Can)

Noel Clair then performed several nice matrix tricks using Australian coins – in which the “kangaroo” coins were moving to his other hand to search for the “platypus” coins…  Noel had developed a interesting story to go with this item.   He moved on to tricks with hair bands (star crossed lovers determined to join each other), and showed us the Close-up item “Gozinta boxes”.  He had promised to do a Time Travel experiment some months earlier, and he did it for us now – going back in time, we found that the burnt matches changed to unburned ones, the time on the clock reversed etc.

Using the “Wild Card” effect, Steve Irwin told a story of aliens attacking people as they slept and turning them into zombies.  An effective use of this Wild Card plot !

Al Hirschel displayed a Magical Key that could move on its shaft or not, at his command.

David Whitson  showed us the paperclip joining item,  some more hair band tricks, and then the “World’s Fastest Magic Trick”.  This one involved pictures of a cheetah – the fastest land animal, and elephant and a zebra.

Eric stunned us all with his card item.  Having had a card chosen and lost in the deck, he tossed a random card into the air, and caught it between the two halves of the deck.  Showing us this place in the deck cleanly, he found that the tossed card had landed next to the chosen card !

John  Ferguson did some more items – the Glass Board, and a Mathematical magic item with Magic number rods.  Asking for help from the club he showed us the trouble he was having at three points with Wagner’s Supercloser car trick, and members gave a lot of very useful suggestions to assist. 

(Asking for help from other magicians to remove problem areas from an item is a valuable way in which the club members can help each other.)