On practising magic in public

On Wednesdays, I take my son to therapy in a nearby city. While he's there, I go to a local coffee shop where I spend about seven hours on various work or leisure projects. They include journalism (work), creative writing (leisure), and practising magic (work and leisure.)

So I sit at my booth, I set up my laptop and my closeup pad, and I go to work. Today, I spent about five hours practising two routines. One of them was the four-coin routine that I recently mentioned on this blog, the other was a very colourful and visual ace assembly.

I was mostly ignored, which is kind of odd when you think about it. I mean... there I was, literally making the impossible happen. I was making coins disappear and reappear somewhere else. I was making red-backed aces jump from a blue pile into another a red pile. 

But no one cared. They cared more about their coffee and their donuts than they did about the guy who was defying the laws of nature in the booth next to them.

And that got me thinking about meaning.

See, if I was actually levitating out of the booth, people would have noticed. Why? Because flight has meaning. If people could fly, the world would look radically different than it does right now. We all understand that. Flight is useful.

Making coins vanish from a brass cylinder is not.

Unless, of course, I give it meaning.

When I develop a new magic routine, my first step is usually to drill the moves, the sleights, the timing, until it is all second nature to me. Then, and only then, will I develop a presentation. I insist that my presentations strike an emotional chord in my audience. What I mean by that is that I have to find a way to make my audience care about what I'm doing.

"Watch me make these four coins disappear one by one."

Yawn. That's a puzzle. All that does is show people that you're good at sleight of hand. It's not much better than bragging.

Try this?

"Do you believe in time travel? I do not, but like most people, I wish it were possible. I sometimes ask myself if I would rather go back in time and fix various mistakes or if I would go into the future to better prepare myself today. Let's pretend that this brass container is a time machine and these four coins are time travellers. So if you could travel through time, what three people would you bring with you?"

And now you have an audience who cares.