Second Lesson

Traffic is an issue in LA. . . DUH!!! It's no wonder I don't want to leave my part of town. Yesterday I went to Santa Monica to meet with Paco for his second lesson.

While driving I got a call from Aaron Fisher, I told him that I was going to teach a private lesson. We had an interesting talk about teaching magic. Aaron has strong feelings on the subject as do I. For anyone wanting to seriously study the art, a strong foundation in the basics is imperative. Aaron has spent much of his career lecturing for magicians and I respect what he has to say on the subject.

The lesson started with a review of last weeks material. Paco had been practicing, things were showing improvement but needed some tweaking in the Downs Pam Vanish & Reproduction. I shared with him some fundamental concepts in misdirection like, "The larger motion conceals the smaller motion". To illustrate the point we talked about the larger motion being a tossing motion to vanish the coin, the smaller motion being the actual tuck of the coin into Downs or Classic Palm. I told him the Vernon hitchhike "Where ya going?" story and cautioned him about throwing the thumb out when putting a coin in classic palm. We discussed keeping the forefinger and thumb together when going into classic to prevent the tell. I also told him to get some bigger coins. Throughout the lesson we switched from quarters to half dollars to dollar coins. I taught him some finesse points on the reproduction and went over a couple of variations. We talked about how to hold and show a coin for maximum surface visibility.

We talked a bit about finger palm. Aaron suggested the old Dropping the coin blunder out of Bobo's. . . good call, he loved it.

Next we moved to cards with a self working spectator cuts to the aces. We talked about all the things that can go wrong even with a self working trick. This was a good time to start to introduce the notion of presentation and entertainment.

Then back to the grindstone with Card Shuffling we went over 3 types of shuffles, the layman in the hands shuffle with bridge, the tabled riffle shuffle and the overhand shuffle. We forged forward into injogs and then an injog overhand shuffle control with a selected card. Control to the bottom of the deck in preparation for a simple revelation. We went over this again and again and again and again.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.