Walk-Around Magic at Harvest Restaurant
I followed up the magic performance at The Magic Garage the next night with walk-around magic at Harvest Restaurant in Cupertino on Saturday evening, 1/24/09. It was a program for members of the Palo Alto branch of the Society of American Magicians. The idea was for pairs of magicians to entertain guests between the time they ordered and received their food. Each pair of magicians consisted of one inexperienced magician (such as myself) and one experienced magician. We had the cooperation of the restaurant.
The restaurant was packed due to some high school fund raiser. The inexperienced magicians were myself, Lyn Bonner (secretary of “miscellany” for the club), Joe Caffall (club secretary), and Suresh Govindachar. I was doing a card trick (either a location of a thought-of-card, or one where the four aces magically turn over one by one) and the same linking key ring I had performed at the Magic Garage. Joe did a coin trick in which coins placed into the pocket keep reappearing in the hand. Lyn did Professor’s Nightmare, a rope trick in which 3 different sized ropes become the same length and then return. She has been doing this routine a long time and is very proficient with it. Suresh did a trick where a selected card is revealed by rubbing a pencil against a piece of blank note paper and revealing the value.
The experienced magicians were Michael Feldman, Theron Schaub, and Kim Silverman (president of the club). They did a variety of tricks from their more extensive repetoires. There were also two “intermediate” magicians: Blaine Garst (treasurer of the club) and Stan Sieler. Stan teaches a magic class for the Fremont Union High School District’s Adult Community Education Program. He performed a mentalism effect where he determined the movie randomly selected from a stack of miniature posters by the spectators. Blaine did some pirate-themed magic.
There were quite a few opportunities to perform, since the restaurant was full and there was almost one experienced magician for every inexperienced one. Stan stepped into the role of an experience magician. I think I performed at 6 tables, and also did some magic for Blaine’s girlfriend and son, as well as for Theron’s mother. It was a fantastic experience, and all the advice from the experienced magicians literally improved my act from one table to the next. I screwed up my card location effect a couple of times, but was able to recover immediately by going into the aces turning over effect. I think it’s very valuable to mess up and then recover. Sooner or later, you’re going to mess up something.
