Get the effect!

You know what pisses me off? When you ask someone to name a good trick for instance and they answer "thumb tip"! The thumb tip is not a trick, it's a tool. You would think that such a statement would come from a beginner in magic. And while this is true in most cases in this particular case it was not.

In fact this man is into magic for 40 years now and performs regularly. I had the pleasure to watch him. Here is what happened!

He was doing the 20th Century Silk, you know the effect where you got two blue pieces of silk that you tie together. Then you put the two pieces into a glass and introduce a red piece of silk, which you proceed to vanish. After that is done the performer grabs on of the blue pieces of silk and pulls it from the glass. It turns out that the red piece of silk is now tied between the two blue pieces. It is a terrific piece of magic. Especially if you have the guts to let a spectator hold the knot of the two blue pieces. But anyway, back to the story:

So he got out the two blue pieces AND the red piece. Well okay... He handed out the red piece for examination and gave the ungimmicked blue one to another spectator asking him to tie it to the opposite corner of the blue piece the magician was holding.

At that point my Spidey sense was tingling. How could the spectator do the knot, except on the false side of the piece of silk. And that's what he did. Meanwhile the magicians instructed the guy with the red piece to go to the magician's bag with the red piece and to dump it in there. If you ever wanted to see a face with the jaw wide open, you should have seen mine. As soon as the spectator was back with the others and the knot was in the two blue pieces of silk the magician asked the guy if he had put the red one in the bag. As soon as the guy agreed to this the magicians said: "Oh, really, so what is this doing here?" as he would shake the pieces in his hand and the red one would come out if his hand tied to the one blue piece of silk.

This was so wrong on so many levels. First, he didn't vanish the red one in a magical fashion. In needs a magic vanish, in order to magically appear elsewhere. Second, the red one produced came from his hand (seemingly) making having a gimmick entirely pointless. Third, the red one was not in between the two blue pieces, but on just one end. And that is missing the whole effect.

I asked him why he performed it that way and not with the red one in the middle. He told me: "Ah that is too difficult this way works the same, been doing it for 30 years."

Not only did this man think that the proper practice was no worth it, he also thought there is no difference between the actual effect and the way he was doing it. And he tortured his audience with this for 30 years.

You know what... saying that the thumb tip is a pretty good magic trick, maybe the smartest magic related thing he ever said.

Far from being good, yet this next video is way better than what I saw that day: