It's A Heavily Booked Month!

.:Finally, Progress:.

January has been a surprisingly good month for magic and mentalism, as I can count four bookings so far, with the potential for one more in the wings.

It's funny though, because most of my bookings have been for children's parties. That being said, I had no choice but to start learning some standard stage effects that they use for parties, which means I'm trying to bring my children's party magic up to par with my mentalism.

While I doubt that they genuinely are at pace with each other at this point, I can safely say that I've improved my kid's party magic a lot, what with some new effects I've been working on, such as sponge balls, Richard Sander's Fiber Optics, and a few touches from Mel Mellers all the same. This is a great month, and I'm having the time of my life learning new things. It's been keeping me from being stagnant.

.:Magic Club Adviser...:.

In case you didn't know, I was nuts enough to start two clubs in Reedley: a Philosophy club, and a Magic club. Being adviser to those two clubs is just really an amazing experience.

Sure, the Philosophy club is also great, especially since they're watching "Battle Royale" at the moment, but at the heart of it all, it's the Magic club that really challenges me to improve. I'm teaching them magic, and when you get down to it, I can't teach them if I'm not particularly good at it, so I've been working extra hard to make sure that I have enough material to teach them outside of plain old card tricks.

For the third quarter, progress with the club has been slow. I was limited to teaching them card tricks, so I was trying to get them to learn the mechanics of classic card effects, and struggled while they were figuring out how to do the Biddle trick. Do realize most of these kids have never been exposed to magic before I came along, so their knowledge of magic would mostly be limited to 21-card tricks and the like. I had to teach them Oz Pearlman's four effects from "Born To Perform Card Magic": the Biddle Trick, the Ultimate Transpo, the 2-Card Monte, and the Ambitious Card.

All in all, the students are managing, but when I left that behind to move onto sponge balls and ropes and rings, they were really enjoying the club more and more, particularly when I started giving them tips on where to get magic items that would be really useful to them and such.

They were especially amused by "Over The Head" when I performed it, mainly because the volunteer who was the subject of my routine had no clue at all what was going on, and there was much laughter when I made her cellphone disappear right under her nose.

I am really enjoying running the club. My students are all understandably over-enthusiastic, but despite that, it's all good. With kids I have to teach new magic to on a weekly basis, I have to learn new magic regularly myself, and I've been improving on that count very steadily, as I've really learned how to work sponge balls and at least a third of Fiber Optics already.

Yep. This is a really promising time for magic. Here's hoping I can sustain this all through the end of the year.

Yeba!

.:Party! Magic! Yeba!:.

Last Sunday was a really interesting day for me, as I had a walkaround gig for sir Freddie of Neutral Grounds, where things went pretty well for the most part. It was a children's party, but the tables I went around were mainly the adult tables, since I didn't want to encroach on Wan Lu's performance, who was both host and stage magician.

In any case, it was fun doing my magic again after a long stretch of nothing but mentalism. Sure, I definitely had lots and lots of mentalism mixed in during my table-hopping, but once you whip out the sponge balls, you just know it's going to be more magic than mentalism, and that's just fine. I definitely have to extend my gratitude to TSC because some of the guys like Mike and Anthony really helped me learn a sponge ball routine in just one day.

It was awesome, to say the least, and I can't wait to get some practice in for my next booking, which is another children's party. It'll be the first stage show I'm doing for children in a bit, so I really want a new routine to accompany that.

Sir Freddie was pretty pleased with the results of my walkaround. The guests were especially amazed by Liquid Metal, and it was exceptionally amusing to find out that the mom of one of the people I performed for in ToyCon was actually the balloon lady at the party. It was really amusing because it was testament that it's a really small world after all.

It was even more fun when I demonstrated sponge balls to my magic class as well. Doubly so when I ended up doing “Over The Head” for them, and they were howling at the part where I made the volunteer's cellphone disappear right under her nose.

You had to be there to believe it.

It Was A Magical Saturday...

.:Round Robin FTW!:.

Last night, The Story Circle had a very interesting gathering at the Rotary Club, what with all of us being required to perform something for everyone to see.

There were some notable performances, like Resemble's comedy routine (No magic at all!), Trycks's routine, and Cardician's. I was a bit happy about the routine I employed though, which was Mel Meller's "Thinking On Your Feet", a variation of the classic "Sam The Bellhop", except with jumbo cards and painful puns. I think the people were amused, for the most part, even if my performance needed work.

A big thanks to Anthony, Mike, Cakit, and Trycks for helping me out with working on sponge balls and other ideas for my show today.

Well, I'm off soon. Wish me luck! This ought to be good.