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.