Tag: kellar

Virgil and Julie Image
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Virgil the Magician – An Unexpected Treat

Virgil and Julie ImageWe discovered, quite unexpectedly, a literal metric ton of information about Virgil the Magician and his partner, the Sweet Heart of Magic, Julie.

Our discovery started like all our internet discoveries.  We were looking for coins to add to our collection — we have a fondness for Silver Dollars minted by the Carson City Mint.  They’re not magic coins and we usually look for the lowest grade, soft coins, for ease in manipulation and difficulty in discerning the difference between coins vanished on one side of the close-up mat and reappeared on the other.  But that’s just us.

So, we’re looking for coins on eBay and finding nothing.  eBay’s algorithm directs us to thing it believes we will like based on our search for coins around the 1900s.  That leads to gift or challenge coins given by performers or military members to one another or to audiences as a memento.  One of those coins happened to be a rather distorted version of a token for the Virgil show.

That lead us to searching Virgil and we hit a divided road in an internet constructed wood: we could chase Virgil the poet or Virgil the magician.  We chose the latter.  As far as we know Virgil the poet was great at writing in dactylic hexameter about the sacking of Troy and visiting Italy.

We saw no mention of him performing even rudimentary magic tricks although we did stumble upon an abstract for a paper about the use of magic in his poetry.   (See, Rand, E. K. “Virgil the Magician.” The Classical Journal, vol. 26, no. 1, 1930, pp. 37–48. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3290464. Accessed 29 Mar. 2021).  His magic seemed to be restricted to sorcery and the ability to predict the future according to the author’s abstract.

We saw no mention of coin routines, Cups-N-Balls or Color-Changing Hanks.  There was a slight mention of what we thought might have been an ancient method of performing Hyrum the Haunted Hank but it turns out we were reading it incorrectly.

But back to Virgil the magician and his assistant, Julie, the Sweetheart of Magic.  We wanted to know more, especially after reading about his world-tours and notes by his contemporaries that he was of the old school of our Art.

He was born in 1900 and passed away in 1989.  While performing one of his early shows, he invited a young lady to the stage to assist in an effect and injured her in the process.

We searched and searched for more information about the trick causing the injury and the extent of the injuries.   Nonetheless, Virgil felt so badly about the injured woman that he visited her often.  They fell in love and she became his life-long partner, the Sweetheart of Magic, Julie.

We were hooked.  We had to know more.

 

Their posters proclaimed the world-wide acclaim received for their marvelous and astounding shows consisting of a full magic show and then a memory act by Julie and a Spirit Cabinet.

Spirit Cabinets are our secret obsession.  We have been in them as a volunteer and watched them as committee members and audience attendees.  We can’t get enough of them.  If you hint you’ll be doing a Spirit Cabinet, we’ll be first in line to buy a ticket.

They bring together the excitement of Spiritualism and the origins of the modern escape act — I believe.  The Kellar Rope Tie was kept top secret and allegedly derived from Kellar’s work with the Davenport Brothers — Spiritualists who were securely tied to wooden benches in a cabinet.  The doors to the cabinet would close and instantly — faster than a Metamorphosis transfer — hellz would be apopin.  Things flying, music playing, slates getting written on and then instantly the doors would open to show the bothers securely tied as they were left at the start of the hullabaloo.

We learned the Kellar Rope-Tie as a young man and realized it was not that easy to pull off secretly and consistently.

So we sought more information about Virgil and Julie, the Sweetheart of Magic.  They travelled with an enormous amount of equipment.  According to Genii’s MagicPedia, they went from 10 tons of props, drapes, curtains to 33 tons in 1957 when they travelled the world from New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, Pakistan, India, England and Ireland.  Whoo!  That is some travelling.  They continued to tour in the Americas through 1978.

We were fortunate enough to find a video of Virgil and Julie, the Sweetheart of Magic performing the Spirit Cabinet on the old television show, The Gary More Show in the 1960s.  We have embedded it above to show a truly professional couple perform amazing feats under incredible test conditions.  They truly were of the old and fondly missed school of magic.

We love going down the rabbit hole and find that if we are in a hardware store, a carpet center, Costco or even a bicycle shop, our mind — small as it is — activates its Magic Obsession Gene and we will search out magic of some kind.  Tricks we could create, tricks we know, and objects we just know are worth buying to bring back to the shop and develop into the next miracle.

Whilst on the web, we do the same thing and can spend hours tracking down minute and sometimes conflicting. details about our art.  (For example, there is a debate whether Virgil appeared on Ed Sullivan.  Some web authors say he did — and there is even a brochure with images that were allegedly taken during the performance — but we have read other authors like David Charvet, author of a Virgil biography with help from Julie, the Sweetheart of Magic, who claim he did not perform the Sullivan show because he was concerned stage-hands would learn his secrets during rehearsal.   (*See, Magic Cafe at https://www.themagiccafe.com/forums/viewtopic.php?topic=98821).  If, in fact, he did not perform on the show, that demonstrated incredible devotion to his craft — at the time, The Ed Sullivan Show was must-see television for all America and the launching pad for The Beatles in the U.S.

Our interest is only piqued.  We will continue to search and learn about this man we so fortunately uncovered in our search for soft, silver dollars minted in a factory that came and went during the silver strike days in Nevada.

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Inside Magic Review: The Imp Bottle

Advertisement for Imp BottleEditor’s note: With the pandemic causing dramatic changes in our Art, we thought we would republish some of our reviews from a while back.  Here is one from September 19th, 1907.  Inside Magic was just a pamphlet then and published in limited quantities (and qualities). 

The hottest trick on the market is the new Imp Bottle effect.  It is the rave of all the magicians in the know that we know.  It has received oodles of praise in the magic press and greats such as Houdini, Kellar and Thurston have testified to its endearing qualities and profound affect on audiences.  Just how good is it?  Inside Magic’s review follows but the skinny is that it is the genuine article, the cat’s meow and how.

Effect: You show a cute little vase made from a high quality wood and finished with a brilliant sheen.  It stands erect on the table or in the magi’s hand.  You explain that this bottle contains an “imp” that can be mischievous at times if not assuaged with praise.  If the imp is pleased, he will allow the vase to lie down with its top touching the table.  If, however, the imp feels frightened or insulted, he will refuse to allow the bottle to be set in such a configuration.

You demonstrate what you have explained by praising the imp and comforting it with soothing talk.  You then set the vase on its side and it remains in that position until you take it back up.

You now ask one of your many spectators to hold the vase and try to set it on its side.  Despite the volunteer’s kind words and good intentions, the imp in the bottle refuses to recline.  The vase remains standing straight up.  It is quite a mystery.

Review: We received the effect from a magic supply house for the purposes of this review but that shouldn’t bias our assessment.  We have to give it back when we are done with it.

This one is a real fooler.  The effect as described above is exactly what your audience sees.  You can play up the story of the “imp” with gusto and ad libs aplenty because the effect is almost a self-working one.  When we performed this for an audience recently, we gave a story about how the imp was entrapped in the bottle by a mean sorcerer who was jealous of the imp and his charming ways.  Perhaps the story went on too long because the audience dwindled to a single member and we presume he remained only because we set the imp bottle in his hand as we provided our patter.  Nonetheless, he was suitably impressed when he found that despite his kind words and magic flourishes provided by his free hand, he could not make the imp comply with his instructions.  No matter what he tried, the bottle would not remain on its side.

We felt badly for those in the audience that left before this pay-off because it was a real hum-dinger!

In the future, we will limit the time allotted for our story about the imp to no more than five minutes.  We started losing audience members around the ten minute mark and so five minutes ought to provide just the right amount of backstory to build up the astounding final effect.

If you are a close-up magician, this is a trick you should have in your waist coat or vest pocket no matter the situation.  It is the perfect combination of “easy to do” and “great to see.”

For those of us who do stage shows, it may be possible to build this into a very large bottle with a real imp but we haven’t worked out the plans for such an illusion.

Inside Magic Rating: Five Out of Five!

Magic News

Magicians, History and Corn Dogs

Kellar's Latest IllusioinYou can ask anyone, what does Inside Magic like?

Those in the know will say, usually with a chirpy tone, cool magic stuff from magic history and corn dogs.

Taking the list in order, we look constantly for cool magic stuff from magic history.  We have a key to the city given to Harry Blackstone Jr. given by the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan.  We have posters and pictures of great magicians through the years.  Some of our fondest memories have been eating corn dogs.

Other great memories have been talking to older magicians about the magicians they have seen or with whom they worked.

We recalled a wonderful conversation about Harry Blackstone, Jr. (the impetus for our mention of my souvenir) and how compassionate he was for his staff and assistants.  He certainly did not need to be – he was the star and his show was a hit.  But he was.

We have a multi-page letter handwritten by Doug Henning in response to our question, “how can a magician who is only 12 make it as a professional.”

Not surprisingly, he did not tell us to get an agent, make posters, berate theater managers; but to practice the art, learn the rules of being a magician and have fun.

We work in a wonderful art.  People genuinely love to be entertained and fooled and corn dogs.

We provide two out of the three and the more we do it, the more entertaining it becomes for us and our audience.

We wonder how the younger generation learns about our grand history.  Perhaps there are still meetings over an occasional corn dog where mustard-stained young performers can hear stories of Willard the Wizard, Thurston, Houdini, Kellar, Dante and our favorite, Harry Blackstone, Jr.

Although the image is not of Harry Blackstone, Jr. or any deep-fried hot dog, we think the poster used by Kellar displaying his “latest” illusion of “self-decapitation” is illustrative of our wonderful history.  No one – at least no one we have seen in the last 20-years has performed “self-decapitation” and even decapitation of others has fallen into disfavor (correctly in our humble opinion) due to world events.  But his poster was drawn in sketch form, colored in, placed on lithographic machinery and literally inked with several different passes – one for each color – leaving a space to make the poster applicable to the town or setting where Kellar would soon perform.  How wonderful.

You can find wonderful posters of magicians and non-magicians throughout history at the Library of Congress for your viewing and enjoyment.  We hope you do.

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What Goes Into Inventing a New Magic Trick?

What goes into inventing a magic trick?

That’s a question we are trying to answer as we develop, possibly for sale, an effect that could be popular with close-up magicians.  Because that’s what we do, close-up magic, it seemed natural to make commercial offerings of the tricks we do for audiences in the amateur rooms at The Magic Castle.

So we have this trick that audiences seem to enjoy and it really just depends on sleight of hand invented by our forbears.  We don’t know who invented the classic force – perhaps Johann Hofzinser back in the 1800s or someone more recent.  We want to credit the right person and so we search.  We can tell you one thing for sure, do not look up “Classic Force” on Google from your work computer.  Wow.  There is something not right with this world.

The second part of the trick involves a false pass of an object.  Who invented that?  Maybe one of Hofzinser’s friends or students or maybe it was T. Nelson Downs (“The King of Koins”).  We want to credit this move to its rightful owner as well.

But inventing a trick means more than giving credit to the right person.  We found we needed to write instructions for magicians wishing to practice the effect and performing it to maximum effect.  We are not big on giving a link to the magician and letting him or her find the instruction video on-line.  It seems impersonal and an easy way out.  We’re more of a UF Grant kind of organization with illustrated instructions covering each move and describing how to perform said move.

Let’s assume we get past the crediting and the instruction writing, the next step will be to come up with a name that grabs users’ attention.  We never had a name for this trick.  It was always just the effect we working on.  We’ll have to work on that as well.

Finally, we have to write ad copy that doesn’t mislead potential buyers.  We want to be honest about the effect to be presented from the audience’s point of view, the skills necessary to perform the effect, any angle issues, and whether the performer will need to practice to perform.

Let’s assume we get the ad copy correct and have no blatant lies in our listing, we will have to get friends and associates to write one sentence, objective recommendations for the effect.  We know some influential people and maybe they would be kind enough to write such praise.  We’d like some of the praise to follow the current trend of “fooled me badly,” “the kind of trick you will carry always” “I was floored” “Not since biblical times has such a miracle been seen,” “I rank the inventions as Sliced Bread, [the yet to be named trick] and the cotton gin,” “if I could buy only one trick that I would use constantly it would be …” “the finest trick of its kind anywhere” or the ever popular “I wish this wasn’t being sold so I could be the only one who had it.”

Then comes the pricing.  We don’t know how to price an ordinary deck of cards (with which one can perform second deals) and the special gimmicks that make the trick possible.  We’re thinking the cards could be supplied by the performer so we would only need to send the gimmicks.  They don’t weight too much – maybe a couple of ounces but they are specially made and cost us about $14 each.  So we’re looking at a total cost of $30 or so.  By checking mark-up of similar effects, we figure that means we should charge anywhere from $45 to $75.

Of course the second we launch the effect, we’ll learn from the various forums that the trick was actually invented by someone either a year ago or back in the 1920s.  We’ll feel terrible, apologize and take it off the market.

That’s just how we work.  We believe in not stealing effects, even if it is done without actual knowledge.  We don’t steal jokes either.  In fact, we have a non-stealing philosophy about most things – we’ll steal a kiss from our sweetie or steal fake fruit from a movie set if the script calls for it – but otherwise we’re this side of taking things we don’t own outright.

We wonder how so many magicians can invent new tricks, take the criticism of theft that comes from the magic public; or worse, failure to properly credit the innovators who invented parts of the trick.  They must have iron constitutions.  It would send us into a shame spiral – and not a good kind where you’re ashamed that you won a beauty contest over someone who came in second only because she couldn’t remember a good answer to one of those questions asked by celebrity judges.  A bad kind of shame spiral where you doubt everything you have ever done and assume no one like you.

We thought about copyrighting, patenting or trademarking the trick to prevent theft – assuming we are the inventor of the trick but our research shows that none of these intellectual property laws would help.  Copyright goes to the expression of an idea on paper or in action.  We could copyright our instructions but someone could come along with a new set of instructions and avoid a copyright claim.  A trademark only protects indications of origin of the effect.  As long as the thief differentiated the source with a new trademark or name for the trick – which right now would be easy because it doesn’t have a name – he or she would be scott-free.  A patent would not help because we would have to expose the secret to the patent office and to the world.  There would be nothing to sell, the secret would be out.  There are plenty of examples of patented magic tricks.  We would normally link such things but do not want to give away secrets — even very old ones.

Maybe we’ll keep the trick in our act, teach magicians we know if they ask, and watch as they improve upon it in their performances.  No shame spiral is likely and pride is almost certain to come.

If you see us and want to know the trick (assuming you are a bona fide magician) we’ll share it with you if it isn’t already obvious from our performance.  Sharing is caring and we care deeply about our wonderful art and the friends we have met.  The same friends we would have imposed upon to write glowing reviews such as “I literally lost control of my bodily functions upon seeing the effect,” or “this is the kind of trick with which you can start a cult.”

Magic History, Magic News

Magic and Anesthesiology in the News

So we were perusing Anesthesiology: The Journal of the American Association of Anesthesiologists whilst waiting for our HOT POCKETS® brand Breakfast – Ham, Egg & Cheese sandwich to cook and came across two articles with magical applications.

The first is by Dr. Amr Abouleish titled “Try and hold your breath while reading this!”

The second is “A Mixed (Long- and Medium-chain) Triglyceride Lipid Emulsion Extracts Local Anesthetic from Human Serum In Vitro More Effectively than a Long-chain Emulsion,” by Weiming Ruan and Deborah French.

The first piece gives an anesthesiologist’s take on magician David Blaine’s world record setting attempts at holding his breath (as opposed to holding someone elses?) for more than 17 minutes. You can watch the TED Talk in which Mr. Blaine instructs audience members in the special preparation needed to hold their breath for more than three minutes after breathing “normal” or upwards of 17 minutes after huffing pure oxygen.

Dr. Abouleish poses the following question to his new anesthesiologist residents when discussing the relationship of end-tidal CO2 and respiration. “If your oxygen saturation is 100% and you hold your breath, what would your oxygen saturation be when you have to breathe?”

Of course all magicians know the answer to this but non-magic oriented medical residents need to be reminded of the relatively slow decline in oxygen saturation experienced by pre-oxygenated patients under general anesthesia.

We agree with Dr. Abouleish’s praise of Blaine’s talk. Those in the audience were able to hold their breath for as long as three minutes or more. Check it out for yourself and abide the constant warnings that this is not a skill easily acquired and one should never try this under water. The chance of passing out is high and because the risk of drowning whilst underwater is directly proportional to being conscious, you could, in the medical parlance, “konk out and die.”

The comments to Dr. Abouleish’s article are also instructive. There is general agreement that Mr. Blaine should have sought advice from an anesthesiologist rather than neurologists.

Instructive is a comment from Dr. Gerald Zeitlin. His capitalization and grammar is taken verbatim from his post:

As you all know Dr. Abouleish is discussing apneic oxygenation.

Watching David Blaine do his 17 minutes was fantastic – but what an incredibly wasted opportunity for science.

As we all know, HE SHOULD HAVE CONSULTED AN ANESTHESIOLOGIST!

Neurosurgeons “Don’t know nuffin’ ” about respiratory physiology. Why did Blaine not have an arterial line for his record attempt – then we’d have known what his arterial pCO2 was after 17 minutes.

Of course we all know that, at rest, during apnea the pCO2 rises between 3 and 5 mm. Hg per minute.

I failed math in Kindergarten but I think 17 times, let’s say 4 mm. Hg = 68. So, approximately he was at 108 mm.Hg pCO2.

As WE (anesthesiologists) know that level has mild to moderate anesthetic properties. I bet if you Emailed Dr. Eger he would know what the MAC of CO2 is.

We would love to meet Dr. Zeitlin. He is our kind of guy.

The second article of magic merit in the February 2012 edition of Anesthesiology, attempts to the answer the age old question, which extracts local anesthesia better, a “mixed” triglyceride lipid emulsion or a long-chain version?

Houdini’s correspondence with Kellar on this issue springs to mind.

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