Friday, October 06, 2006

Spooky Magic Night at Ring 50 brings out the Spiders, Ghosts, and Magical Spirits

President Dwight Redman opened the Spooky Magic show for the 50 members of the audience with a gruesome butcher knife blade being smashed down and through his arm while attempting to cut an orange in mid air! Ouch!

Captain Token the Magician (Louis Hofheimer) opened his performance with a board of lethal spikes was shoved through thru his arm without any noticeable harm. Then from an empty tube he produced a mountain of silks. With a whirl his solid cane vanished and left behind two silks. Capt Token then poured a 12-ounce can of grape soda filling four 8-ounce glasses. Then a young audience member had her head pierced with a flaming spear.

Jim Flanigan opened with The Web in which four blank cards were placed in volunteer Laurie Currie's hand. When the cards were shown again, there were spider webs on each one. They were turned over and she was asked to wave her hand over them. She let out a loud scream when she saw a black spider was clinging to the back of her hand. Next he performed a variation of the popular Bob Sheets illusion Hang 'Em High. Sitting in a chair, he struck a pose similar to one done by the actor Edward Norton in the "The Illusionist". He told how Norton, playing the part of a magician, made ghostly figures of a boy and a woman appear beside him. Jim planned to transform himself into an apparition and pull a solid object through his body. Two audience volunteers checked out the long length of rope by doing several tug-of-war yanks. Then, appearing to go into a trance, Jim pulled the rope through his body.

Rucj Uffelman began his presentation with a brief discussion of the Celtic roots of Halloween and their belief that the dead walked among the living on Halloween and the laws of nature were distorted on that evening. While he was talking Rucj set out a carved wooden stand which supported a pendulum. He started the pendulum and moved on to performing a book test based on the Dracula novel. As Rucj performed, audience noticed and became amused by the pendulum in the background; its swings became larger and larger until the pendulum was going around and around in full circles appearing to violate the law of gravity. Rucj concluded his presentation by having a spectator freely select one of eight face down cards. The seven unselected cards were then each revealed to depict the image of a fly. Rucj tied the fly image to one of the characters in the Dracula novel, as he had the spectator show that the selected card displayed the image of a bloody smashed fly.

Mike Taggert, Magician Extraordinaire, mystified everyone with his original routine entitled the bad guy in the box also known as Maggie and Jigs by Viking. After making a fruit and vegetable salad with his disecto equipment, he invited an audience member to join him to di-sect his hand.


Keith Pass drew a picture of a spooky skull on a white board (Axtell Drawing Board) and suddenly it came to life and the eyes began to move. Keith demonstrated a form of Pepper's Ghost making the spirit of John Carver come back from the dead to take back his lucky coin using a coin thru the glass effect.

“Lorenzo the Great” (Larry Lipman) performed a trick he calls "strap tube" a version of "ropes through neck" using straps and a plastic tube (hence the imaginative name). Two volunteers pull the straps through the tube and through Matt Hiller’s body. The top half of his body slammed down on the bottom half of his body and there wasn’t too much blood and it didn’t hurt a bit.

Past President Eric Henning recounted a dream in which he played a game of "Nine Card Monte" with the Devil. Even though old Scratch cheated, Eric won his soul back in this version of Steve Bryant's "Satan's Monte." He then had three helpers choose cards, which were shuffled back into the deck, and proposed to find the cards with his "hypersensitive touch." While Eric's head was turned away, the cards mysteriously rose into his hand one at a time - the last card rising while the cased deck was held by an audience member!

Noland Montgomery opened with a card routine involving a tongue-in-cheek manipulative sequence in which he removed a deck from its box, one handed, then apparently made the box disappear, but only temporarily. He then did a comedy mind reading trick involving two spectators, a deck of cards, and an over sized rubber ear. He followed this with his "street" version of the cups and balls--which is a two cup, two ball routine using the "Gazzo" cups (a very very large set of cups), a gibeciere (poacher's pouch), a magic wand, and a hat, and culminating with the production of two baseballs from under the cups followed by a coconut from under the seemingly empty hat.
~ ~ Bob Patterson