Dumb Tricks: Gleem Vanish

I stayed at my friends’ place this weekend. They have two kids, 8 and 10 years old. The idea for this trick came to me in during the day and I performed it for them that night when they went to brush their teeth. The kids freaked out—running around, screaming and spitting toothpaste foam everywhere. I don’t do too much performing for kids, but I think this is a perfect casual kid’s trick. It’s a variation on a standard beginner’s magic trick, but with a kicker ending that blows their dumb little minds.

There’s a trick from Tarbell called Ear It Is by Harry Crawford. You may know it even if you don’t think you do. It’s a coin vanish where you tap the coin with a pencil, only to have the pencil vanish. You show the pencil is really just behind your ear. During that misdirection, you ditch the coin. Then you make it “really” vanish.

If you don’t know it, here’s me teaching the trick.

Just kidding, that’s not me. But that’s the trick I’m talking about.

So this weekend, when the kids were brushing their teeth, I walked past the bathroom and said, “You guys want to see a trick?”

Propositioning pre-teens in the bathroom is something many of you are more comfortable with than I am, but the door was open and their parents were right there, so it wasn’t anything sketchy. And, of course, they wanted to see a trick.

I grabbed my toothbrush and took the cap off the toothpaste tube. I did the same pen/coin vanish as in Ear It Is, just with the toothbrush and the cap. I would say the kids were moderately impressed by that. Even for kids, it’s not that great a trick.

What really set them off was when they asked me where the cap was and I pointed to the toothpaste tube that was no longer within arms reach of me, and the cap was back on the tube.

The method was simply that I had the extra cap from the toothpaste tube I travelled with. When I was starting the trick I took their tube and mimed removing the cap and then brought my extra cap into view and focused attention on that. I tossed their tube of toothpaste aside so it ended up far away from me. No one is paying that much attention at that stage, so just miming removing the cap is as fooling as it needs to be.

And from there, it’s just the standard effect with different props.

The way the trick progresses: from a sort of “gag” vanish, to a real vanish, to an unexpected reappearance, is very strong from a kid’s perspective, I think.

Later that night, my friend went into her 8-year-old’s room and he was lying in bed, hands clasped behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. “I can’t go to sleep,” he said. “I can’t stop thinking about that toothpaste trick!”

I can tell this trick is going to stick with them for quite some time, maybe forever, similar to the way I still vividly remember dumb tricks I saw when I was a kid. That’s why it will be especially fun, years from now, when they mention this trick to deny it ever happened and try and convince them that it must have been a shared hallucination.