Let the Force be With You

(from 2013)

Now this is a post designed to make you concentrate.

Or to skip it.

It is all about “magic.”

I recently picked up a book by Theo Annemann. He was my mentor as a teenager – when I was into all things magic. My very first paying job (part-time) including demonstrating conjuring tricks to shoppers in a London department store in the weeks leading up to Christmas. There was a British TV magician named David Nixon, who was bald and unflappable and did amazing things for the era, and the store was marketing his box of tricks. They were all designed to work themselves – no actual conjuring skills required, which fitted my lack of talent perfectly. We sold a lot of them. However, in reality, I was more into what was then called “mind magic” and that is where Annemann was King.  I obtained nearly all his magazine The Jinx, from a specialist shop near the British Museum, and in later life, sold them for an amazing sum when needs must. Annemann perfected the “catching a bullet in the teeth” routine, but within the profession was best known for his “mentalist” skills. He committed suicide at the age of 34 in 1942. I don’t know why. As a teenager his magazine always seemed very cheerful to me.

Anyhow - the standard trick was to get an audience to choose all sorts of things, a color, a card, a word, a number – perhaps a whole collection of things – and then to produce from a sealed envelope (from a suitably guarded location) the results ALREADY WRITTEN DOWN. The sealed envelope was usually stored in a bank vault guarded by the UK equivalent of the National Guard, or was suspended in full view throughout the trick. The message was that the performer had no way of getting at the contents. So the performer had either known what you would choose, “READING YOUR MIND” (shock, gasp, horror) or had somehow made the magic words appear on the piece of paper in the sealed envelope.

It was all the rage in the 1930s. And NO – don’t be rude - I don’t actually go back to the 1930s. Not quite...

There were two basic ways you could perform the stunt.

One was to get the result into the envelope AFTER the event – devices like thumb tips enabled messages to penetrate envelopes while the performer held them up, waffling on about how impenetrable the contents were, while a female assistant cavorted about in a skimpy bathing suit, for the express purpose of taking the audience’s eye off the ball.

But the other way – MY WAY – was to FORCE the choice you already had written down. I went for this choice because it required less skill. In many cases, it required no skill at all. That suited my level of ineptitude...  I also had difficulty finding any willing female assistant at that stage of my life to dress up (or dress down) for the purpose of misdirecting the audience.

So – concentrate now – I am going to force on you a word. And it starts with forcing a book on you.

One of the simplest ‘forces’ involves three books – let’s call them Blue, Yellow, and Green. (Only they must not be as obvious as that for the actual trick.)

I want to “force” you to choose the Green.

So I say to you, spreading the books out very casually (and that’s the key, to be very “casual”) “take away two...”

You take away the Blue and the Yellow, and I proceed as if nothing has happened by holding up the remaining one (the Green) – and getting on with the act.

Ah, but what if you take away the Yellow and Green or the Blue and the Green? I say you – equally nonchalantly – “and give me one...”

If you give me the Green, I proceed as if nothing has happened by holding it up and getting on with the act...

If you give me the Yellow or the Blue, I take it away, and leave you with the Green – so this is what you have “chosen”.

As long as you are sufficiently nonchalant, you will get away with it every time. People’s minds won’t query, here – why didn’t this idiot just ask me to choose a book like any normal person? They will honestly accept what you have done. But of course you can only ever do it once!

So we have “forced” the Green.

Now to “force” a word in the book.

If you had a large audience, you could get different people to do part of the calculation to “prove” there was no collusion – as one person could be a plant.

Get an audience member to write down a three figure number. ANY three figure number (although you could suggest they choose their age or house number plus something else if you wanted to make it seem even more “amazing”).

Get them to reverse the number and take the smaller number away from the larger.

Now with the total, reverse it and add the total and the reversed number together.

This is just window dressing...

However you work out this sum the answer will always be 1089.                                

There are numerous mathematical variations on that theme. Although today of course, since we all now use calculators and are numerically illiterate, it would fail completely because no-one would do the math correctly.

With your number 1089, break it up so that you go to page 10, line 8, word 9 on the line and so – big flourish - YOU HAVE CHOSEN THE WORD (insert as appropriate).

So here in this sealed envelope – in a sealed box – guarded by whatever was the maximum window dressing you could afford to give the trick – is the number I have written down earlier – KNOWING THROUGH MY SUPERIOR POWERS WHAT YOU WOULD CHOOSE.

And of course – big finish and the equivalent of a drum roll - you get it right. Every time. Amazing! Well, for a modern audience, obviously not. But in those unsophisticated times...

Modern “magic” has evolved far greater ways of performing basically the same act – but the principles are just the same.

So there you have it.

The trouble was – mind-reading and “magic” were not the most approved of hobbies in my circle and background. Then gradually as I grew older other pursuits took over. You know, girls, young ladies, that sort of thing...

And “pick a card” turned out to be one of the worst chat-up lines you could ever find!