At the second this goes live I will just have finished giving a sort of impromptu lecture on the Alakazam discord theatre. I did this as a favour to the store, which is nice, and my friend Wayne who does a lot of promo work for them.
I couldn’t possibly have done it to raise my own profile to ahead of my upcoming book release later this year (hopefully).
If rather than coming here from that lecture you’re one of my regular readers (whom frankly I didn’t realise I had) consider this a little free lesson in how I perform off the clock.
The subject of the lecture is my Purse Strings routine and in the off chance that someone enjoyed it but needed to jog their memory about some part of it, I present this article as a companion piece.
Opening abstract
A while ago I set myself a challenge. As an amateur magician I had taken to carrying around three ropes in my handbag, just in case someone asked me to show them a trick. My colleagues knew I was learning magic and I thought the professors nightmare was the flashiest thing I could perform. Often this was enough but it reeked of overpreparation, and despite taking a huge space in my handbag, I only had the one routine, so about 3 minutes, or 4 with some jokes. People wanted more… and I wasn’t carrying it. What I really wanted was something smaller, easier to carry, more natural than magicians ropes and, (most importantly) useful for a wider number of tricks.
I know, scream it from the rooftops: A deck of cards.
With a deck of cards you can perform for upwards of 44 years¹ throw in a sharpie and you’re set for life. There’s only one problem with this however, and it is the fact that I hate card tricks. Over the years I’ve learned to appreciate some of them, but they have to be truly transcendent state of the art, well presented miracles. Certainly not the level of magic I could achieve. So if I’m never going to be happy with my own card tricks, I was going to need something else.
There are alternatives to my solution.
Fay Presto works with nothing but her fingers and thumbs (if you know what I mean) and she can produce things, vanish things, change things, restore things, the list goes on. As far as the audience knows she isn’t carrying anything, all her props are sourced from the world around her but she is again a top tier performer and has way more confidence than I had when I was putting together my plan.
Craig Petty famously has something like a half hour set which he can perform with nothing but his keys. Admittedly, this is because his keyring is almost entirely populated with special props for key based magic tricks, but the audience doesn’t know that- they just assume he has many houses and cars.
But I didn’t go down any of these routes. I chose a shoelace in a purse. Because, as I tell my audiences in these off the cuff moments, I am working on a shoe string budget.
The Prop Itself
The purse is a totally ordinary coin purse. Most magicians have never seen a purse frame with an actual bag on it. I chose one that matches the colour of the shoelace, and I chose red because it’s nicer than black or white. I am contemplating switching to an old school yellow and brown striped shoelace but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to find a purse that goes with it. The purse only really has any active part in my big finale, but it stops the string from getting tangled round my keys and things.
With this I can do a number of things, which I describe below. As this is sitting in my open blog I won’t be giving any methods for these routines, but I present them as an aide memoire, with references for where you can find more detail.
It’s worth noting that these routines are intended to perform in situations where a small number of people have asked to see some magic in a social setting, meaning they’re intended to be scrutinised from up close, often in the spectators own hands.
What I’m saying is they’re not exactly covid friendly, so get a vaccine before you try these out.
The Bachelor’s Needle
I forget where I learned this, but I know it was in a book. Best place to find it now is Daryl’s rope magic made easy DVD (volume 2), which contains a couple of the other routines mentioned here, so is well worth a look.
The basics of the bachelor’s needle are that a cord is wrapped around your thumb from base to tip, and at the tip of your thumb a loop is formed. The method of the bachelor’s needle allows you to apparently thread the hanging cord at the base of your thumb through this loop at high speed, without letting go of it. You can even thread it through if the end of the cord is knotted so tightly that it won’t fit through the loop at all. This is shown as a feat of dexterity but I use it to align my audiences to my way of thinking.
I tend to open with the bachelor’s needle because it has a strong end but a weak start and it sets expectations in a nice way. I perform it in a 3 phase routine.
Firstly I talk about sleight of hand, and openly thread the cord through the loop, posing the question “how quickly do you think you could do that?”. I then pull the cord back out and tighten the loop before doing the actual bachelor’s needle technique. This is where most routines end.
I then explain that this alone isn’t magic. Skill isn’t magic unless you use it deceptively. For example, if I were to pass the cord to them and loop it on the way, I could pretend it had happened by magic. I can then demonstrate this.
This however is too easy to backtrack. For real magic you have to play with people’s perception of time, by handing them the end and letting them see that the cord isn’t through the loop, then when it suddenly is (a state achievable by running your hand back along the cord to do the bachelor’s needle technique under the tension of the spectators own grip) they have no way of in picking what just happened.
False Knot
I don’t always do this, but if my hair is down and I want to do ropes through the neck as my next effect, I need to tie my hair up and this is a fun interlude to get to that state.
This effect is essentially the shoelace knot, which is in so many different rope magic books you’d be hard pressed to find one it isn’t in. You can definitely find it in Abbot’s Encyclopedia of Rope Tricks for Magicians.
In its most basic form it’s a vanishing knot but it can be used in conjunction with a separate knot to have the effect that the knot is detached. The knot I use is an elasticated seamless hair tie which matches the cord, tied in a simple granny knot.
Taking the purse back out from a pocket as if you’re about to stop performing, then as an afterthought ask if they’d like to see more. You can then steal out the knotted hair tie in the action of replacing the purse and perform the entire shoelace knot with it secretly held to apparently pluck off the knotted cord².
Cord Through Self
With my hair tied up I can then perform the Tenkai rope through neck, also in Abbot’s Encyclopedia.
These days I tend to skip the whole false knot part entirely in order to move things on a little quicker, because I learned a very similar routine of passing the rope not through my neck but through my wrist. I learned the rope through wrist from an Axel Hecklau lecture but I’m reliably informed that the method is a classic one and is in print somewhere but none of us could remember where. Perhaps at some point in the future I will find it and come back to update these notes³.
I don’t have a huge amount to say about this because I perform it quite matter-of-factly. Some form of rope through the body is in itself quite an impressive trick but I only use it as a build up to what I consider to be the centrepiece of this whole affair.
Because if you can pass a rope through the self then surely the next step is logically
Cord Through Spectator
I like to keep a kind of explanatory through line when I perform several prices together, and the driving factor of everything is that the string passes through things. This however is where I like to muddy the waters a touch.
Because of the way this works the spectator will feel something happen to their finger and they won’t fully understand it. The explanation I give is that the rope actually cuts off the finger, but it spins in place and reattaches. This is nonsense but it matches the sensation they’ll experience. I also tell them that for a split second their brain will be fooled into thinking it hurt but in truth it doesn’t hurt at all. This as far as I can tell is actually true. The method of this is also available in volume 2 of Daryl’s rope magic made easy.
When I’ve shown this to magicians in the past they’ve sometimes said that they learned it as silk through fingers, and the silk loops under the little finger and crosses between the ring and middle finger of the spectator, with the hand held horizontally. I perform this solely on the index finger of a spectator.
As you’ll know when you learn this, it’s very important to wrap the cord in the right direction, as wrapping it the wrong way round can actually break the finger of the spectator, so my advice is don’t do that… That said, I always wrap it the wrong way twice before I do it for real, pulling it fairly tight as I explain and counter two possible methods they could think of.
Firstly I say that to pull this off I need to build up some speed so I have to slacken the ropes to give a satisfying snap, but they might think this is me loosening the loop to twist it around the front, so the prevent this I ask them to place their other index finger on the crossing point, to stop the loop from opening. Secondly I wrap it the wrong way again and say they may also think I’m just pulling the string off the end of their finger, which I demonstrate slowly, so to prevent that I’ll be pushing the cord towards them as I snap it tight.
Then I wrap it the right way, get them to keep the loop tight with the index finger on their other hand and ask what I consider to be the most important line of the whole thing.
“Would you like me to do this on the count of three, or take you by surprise?”
Make no mistake, you are going to take them by surprise either way, what you are choosing is the nature of the surprise.
If they say “by surprise”, you’re going to say “okay” as you pull the cord tight at the moment they finish the word surprise. No pause, no beat, nothing, just do it.
If they say “count of three” you do give a beat and then say “okay, one two three” and pull on three, not after three. It’s important that you don’t do it as a suspenseful buildup, just say “one two three” as if you were reading it quickly off a page. This will in fact take them by surprise.
As you pull you push the cord towards them, which will have the natural effect of pushing it back over their hand, so you can just let go and leave it draped over their wrist. This is an incredibly disarming moment, as you’re left holding nothing and they are free to examine a piece of string to their hearts content.
There is one other pitfall in this routine, and don’t think it can never happen to you because I thought it couldn’t happen to me. Make sure the person you are performing this with has full use of both hands⁴.
Borrowed Ring Routine
I’ve watched a huge number of ring & string routines and there are loads of resources for learning them. I’d strongly recommend Diamond Jim Tyler’s routine from his Collateral DVD and the excellent resource of Greg Wilson’s Ringleader.
The routine I perform however is mostly based on the one from Nick Einhorn’s Pro-Flite. I bought the routine separately from the gimmick at his lecture a few years ago but I don’t think you can usually get it without the special keyring.
UPDATE: I have been reliably informed that this routine is on Nick Einhorn’s penguin lecture. Thanks for the tip, Eirian.
Like many routines, Pro-Flite ends with the ring being stolen away during the criss-cross move, to be attached to the gimmick. I replaced the standard criss-cross With Diamond Jim’s finesse move, which leaves the cord held at both ends by a pair of spectators, and lets you slide your hand up and down it. For a while I did this to put the ring in a nest of wallets, but now I instead put the ring into the purse in my pocket, having left it with the mouth wide open earlier.
I drop it off during a body turn as. I slide my hand to either end of the cord, but I leave the purse in the pocket at first, meaning I can apparently pull the ring off the cord, then clap my hands to show it completely gone, before taking the string and thanking my spectators, having apparently forgotten the part where I give it back. I very carefully coil the string up to put it away and only when I’ve finished this do I take the purse out, closing it as I do.
I act surprised that the ring is in there and tip it into their hand, letting them check it out as I put the shoelace away ready for my next magical encounter.
Further Research
There are of course plenty of other things that can be done with a single ungimmicked cord, such as comedy rope ties, whole sequences of knot work, appearing knots, vanishing knots, sometimes I’ll add in the Hunters puzzle knot or the lightning knot to pad it out a little, but what’s above is my main go to act.
A short while ago I put together an experimental alternative prop purse with a ribbon in the place of the shoelace, along with 4 large chinese coins, as I’d just learned a routine which used those props, working with the idea that I could technically do all the other things (bar the hair tie production) with a ribbon. What I found however was that the ribbon didn’t read as clearly in those other effects, where a cord made what was happening a bit clearer as it never twisted or turned on its side. On top of this a shoelace is just a shoelace a weird thing to carry but ultimately a mundane item, almost like something from Control or The Lost Room⁵, whereas 4 special coins and a ribbon is a trick.
¹ The approximate length of Paul Gordon’s career at the time of writing.
² That’s a little more methodological detail than I would usually have on this blog but it’s one of the few novel bits of routing you won’t find in print.
³ A friend suggested it was in Tarbell volume 8 and I’m glad the effect they were thinking of is totally different because otherwise I would have had to include a reference to “Rope from Hand Release”
⁴ Okay, you want the full story. I was at a party and I asked this guy to hold out his finger, and he passed his wineglass to someone else. That should have been my first clue that something was wrong, because otherwise he’d have simply held the glass in the other hand.
With the string wrapped around his finger I asked him to put his other index finger on top of the loop and he very slowly, shakily and painfully lifted his other arm. At this point I apologised and said it was okay, but all the confidence drained out of me as I started to run through ways this could go wrong and seriously hurt him as his other finger sort of limply hung over the top of the loop. Thankfully it all worked just fine but it took the wind from my sails and indelibly burnt a lesson onto my mind.
⁵ I just have a thing for fictional universes revolving around mundane objects that are somehow imbued with nonsensical supernatural properties simply by their proximity to an unknowable rift in the fabric of reality.