You put your drink on a table. Cover it with something–a hat, a bowl, a napkin, whatever.
“Hey, Argent: I bet you the next round of drinks that I can drink this whole drink without touching my hat!”
You make the bet. I ostentatiously take a straw, duck under the table, and make loud sucking noises. “Booyah, dude, you owe me a drink.”
You call bullshit and pick up the hat, showing me that my drink is still there.
I pick up my drink and finish it. “NOW you owe me a drink.”
Never touched the hat, did I?
A variation of this one is that you bet someone a buck that you can finish their entire (expensive) drink without touching a straw or their glass. If they take the bet, you pick up their expensive drink, finish it, and give them a dollar.
Please make sure to impress on them that the double lift is a sleight, not a trick, and what the difference is. That is, it should never be done as a stand-alone demonstration, but always be incorporated into a larger trick. Ideally, even if the audience already knows about the sleight, it should be hidden behind enough misdirection that they still won’t be able to say exactly how you pulled off the trick.
Same with palming, false shuffling, forcing a card, etc. These are not tricks, they are the building blocks from which tricks are made. E.g. you don’t force a card onto a spectator and then immediately say “look, I made you pick the three of hearts!” Rather, you keep them thinking that they made a free choice for the remainder of the trick, so that by the time of the reveal, they will no longer be questioning that it was a free choice and the explanation of the trick must be elsewhere.
I use a wonderful book by Ian Adair called simply “100 Magic Tricks” to show my nieces and nephews some basic stuff. Amazon has used copies extremely cheap. Decent tricks, but nothing beyond the level of a 8-10 year old with some practice. Extremely well written and photographed.
I have the Bobo book, also the Hays. Also Hugard’s “Expert at the Card Table”. Great books all, but challenging for the nimble-fingered adult, let alone younger kids.
Definitely! The double-lift trick I’ll teach them is one I love performing for kids. Show the top card (via a double-lift), put it back on the deck, invite a cut of the deck (this is actually the most difficult part for kids, since a lot of them think cutting the deck means lifting up the top card, which reveals the trick early), placing the top card in the middle, and then hamming up shaking the cards and staring and Hocus-Pocusing until the chosen card is shaken back to the top of the deck. I vary it sometimes by handing the entire deck to a member of the audience and inviting them to shake the card to the top. If that audience member has been a good sport, I’ll hand it to them after having done a double-lift; if they’ve been a little turd, they get an untreated deck :D.
Same with other tricks: definitely I’ll teach them the maneuvers in the context of a larger trick. I mention them because I’ll also teach them as building blocks for future tricks: I want them to understand that a lot of magic is learning some basic maneuvers.
Thanks for the feedback! I’ll order some books tomorrow, now that I know my budget.
Eh–you stop noticing the smell after awhile ;).
For supplies I haven’t bought too much, since initially I didn’t know if I’d get reimbursed: just a deck of cards for each kid, a shitty top-hat prop (I figured if I got home and it was good, I’d buy some more for the kids, and if it was bad–which it was–I’d use it as an object lesson in why you shouldn’t rely on shitty props for your tricks), some string, and some rope. Now that I have a budget, I’m going to buy some books that I’ll make available to them, some coins to use in coin tricks (including one that relies on a fake hand-switch to bend a coin–I’ll need to apply a pair of pliers to a bunch of quarters some weekend to prep for this one), and probably some higher-quality rope for a couple of rope tricks. Any other ideas are also welcome.
I’ve never met anyone in the Bible belt who freaked out over magician’s magic, as long as you admit you don’t have mystical powers. Even my anti-magic roommate acquiesced that magicians were cool.
We’ve even had a magician perform at our church: his patter was all missionary-style work.
