X-RAY' MAGIC TRICK WITH FINGER RING REVEALED

When you start to get more experience as a performer who can walk into a space and pick up the beat of that space, the rhythm of that is really exciting. You go into a wedding, that's one kind of vibe. You're at the school cafeteria, there's another kind of vibe. You walk into a place where they're stealing cars and stripping them down really quickly because you can hear the cops in the background coming in. That's another kind of vibe. You walk into these spaces and you get that. Sometimes it gets a bit crazy. Magic can be like everyone's drunk or everyone's on drugs or something because it starts to get nutty. One of the classic things, and I have this happen a lot, is people will take off their finger ring and they'll say, oh, can you do something with this? Whenever they hand me their ring, and it happens a lot, and they say, can you do something with this? I always do this. I go, watch. Feel the back of my hand. They tap it. I say, it seems pretty solid, the back of my left hand, right? I say, but look, I can actually take your ring and just with a tap make the ring melt right up through the back of my hand. Master magician David Copperfield once said that the real magic of magic lies in the performance of the magic. It's what you do. It's what you bring to the moment. It's not just your performance, how you rehearsed it. It's your responding to the situation as it is uniquely every time. The people, the situation, the sounds, all those things. Here's a very simple technique. It's basically the thimble vanish. It's a very old technique. It used to be done with thimbles, which are little pieces of metal people put on their fingers when doing a needle and thread thing. Anyway, it's the thimble vanish. However, I've done something a little differently with it, and there's a bit of a beat. There's a rhythm to it. Let's look at the technique first, okay? So you've got the finger. You take it, you put it on the tip of your finger, and I move from the focus here to the back of my hand. And I say, give that a tap. And I extend my hand. Give it a tap. A few people tap there like that. Now, I'm going to make it look like I take the finger ring and put it in the hand. It's so nice. It's really deceptive. Looks like it goes inside, but it's not. What I'm doing is I am curling the finger back until I can pinch the ring in the right thumb palm. Now, this technique of putting it in and taking it off and putting it in is a great thing to practice during algebra class, okay? Or in some other. I mean, I do it in front of the TV. I do it while driving the car. All these kinds of things. Once you get that smooth, though. So that's the technique. Now, the next half. That's half the slight. The other half is closing the left hand, okay? So I'm going to go. I don't go from cold to here. I tend to go up and down. A larger action here. Bit of a lilt. Up, and as I come down, I put it in thumb palm, grab it here, and do that, okay? Now, you don't want to get too over. You don't want to make it look like your hands are stuck in the other fingers like some honey covered bear trap, okay? You don't want that. You have no idea. Or some bad memory back when you were a prisoner in jail. You don't want to remember those kinds of things ever again. So you're here. So you want to keep it light, okay? So in performance, I'm here. I do that. Now, this is kind of a large action. I immediately turn the left. I let the right hand drop to my side, okay? And the left hand turns over. The reason I do that is if I do this and drop to my side, there's nothing to keep focus here. But if I keep the left hand in motion by turning it over, bringing my eyes to it, and bringing it up a little bit, that'll bring some nice focus. Nobody notices this hand going away. So I'm here. I gesture once there. Boom, boom. I drop this down to my side, and at my side is when I load the finger ring back on, and I come back up and do this. Now that might seem... So what I'm having to do is orchestrate people's attention, all right? Because obviously, if anybody's staring down my right hand as I do this, the illusion destroyed. But in performance, everything is flowing so smoothly. I mean, I really keep it all moving, okay? And it depends. If I'm literally performing for a couple of older people at a table, say, I might slow it down. I might put my hand on the table, say, watch this, it's going to happen, three, two, then move away here, come up, and go, boom, on one. But if I'm performing for a younger group of people, maybe there's going to be a bit more of a flow to the whole thing, okay?