What Happened at the Meeting on Friday 19th January

David Whitson was the host of this month’s magic, with the theme “Free Choice”. David led off the evening with a  presentation of a novelty change bag.  The bag contained a silk which had an outline of a teddy bear – it was “de-fuzzed”, said David. But, with a magical word, the silk changed into one with a fully fuzzy bear.

The next performer was Noel Clair, with his routine “Time Travel Experiment”.  He outlined Einstein’s theory of Relativity for us, reminding us that if we travelled away from earth and back at a speed close to that of light, we could reverse time.

He hoped to do this for us by magic. 

So, he did several things before he reversed time:

• He set a clock going at 2 pm
• Inside a handkerchief he broke a match
• He set fire to matches in a match box
• He moved a card into a wallet under crossed elastic when it had been under straight elastic
• He messed up a deck of cards with a shuffle so that they were face and back, back and face

Then he said the magic word, and he showed us that (1) the clock had stopped at 2pm  (2) opening the handkerchief he showed the match was restored (3) the matches in the match box were restored to unburnt condition (4)  the card in the wallet was back under the straight elastic as it had been before (5) the card were no longer messed up but were all around facing the same way as they had been originally.  Time had reversed !

John Ferguson did a mentalist item in which a card was freely chosen (Yes, it was !) and he told us that the cards were all clean on the backs (and showed us) – except for one card.  “I did write on one card  - What card do you think that might be?” he said, and, yes, it was the chosen card, and the card had the message “You will choose the ten of clubs”.  John congratulated the spectator for being so mentally acute that he was able to read John’s mind and choose the very card that John had written about.

Not so successful was John’s attempt to do Wagner’s Supercloser – but if you are going to mess up, it’s best to do it in front of magicians.  John has now worked out what went wrong, and next time, he will put the Aces in C-H-S-D order !

Joel Howlett entertained us with close up magic.  Each of three chip tokens moved across invisibly from one hand to the other.  Yes, we were all staring at his hands, yet he fooled us !  Joel displayed a rectangle of paper with a hole in each corner.  He folded the paper up and unfolded it, and all holes had gathered together in one corner.

He followed this with a card item in which each of four red-backed aces turned face up in turn, and for the ending, all four cards had different coloured backs !