The Ring and The Campfire Story Performance Style
/“Let’s try and put it on my card, Hopefully it works. I don’t carry cash anymore,” you say. “Well… I can’t carry cash anymore.”
“What do you mean?” your friend asks.
“Stupid curse thing…. It’s nothing.”
“Wait… what?” your friend says.
You let out a long sigh. “Okay. I’ll tell you. But you’re not going to believe it. You see this ring? I was at the flea market a little over a month ago. There was this one table that was run by this very old woman. She was this tiny, wrinkled figure in a headscarf. And she was working the table with a kid who was about 11 or 12. I guess her grandson. Maybe great-grandson.
“The irony is, originally I went over to the table just to be nice, you know? There wasn’t really anyone else looking at their stuff, and they only had a couple dozen items—some jewelry and little trinkets—spread out on their table.
“I saw this ring and was drawn to it, for whatever reason. I tried it on and thought it looked cool. I asked them how much it would cost and the woman blurted out a quick response in a language I didn’t understand. But then her grandson chimed in and translated for her.
“At first I thought he said ‘eighteen dollars’ which seemed high for such a simple ring. Especially in this flea market where I can usually get stuff like this for a couple bucks. But I thought, ‘What the hell. It’s not worth 18 dollars, but this will be like a bit of charity work.” And I tossed them a $20 and told them they could keep the change.
“‘Eighty dollars,’ the kid said. And I was like, What the hell? Eighty dollars for this ring? That’s ridiculous and I took the ring off and tossed it back to them, and took back my twenty and put it in my wallet and went on my way.
“I was actually kind of mad that they’d have the nerve to ask that much for this ring. It’s not unusual for people to ask for more than they expect to receive at these sorts of places, of course. But this was just an insane amount and it annoyed me.
“So I went and did some shopping at some of the other tables, bought some stuff, and got ready to leave.
“As I was heading out, I saw that old woman’s table again, but this time there was nobody behind it. So I made my way over to it and—without thinking too much about it—I pocketed the ring. I felt a little guilty about it. But honestly, not that much. For the most part I felt like I was teaching them a lesson. Although that sounds dumb now.
“After I got to the parking lot I slid the ring on my finger and headed home. Later that night I noticed the $20 I had remaining in my pocket from earlier that day was gone. I must have dropped it at the flea market or somewhere else. I wasn’t too bummed about it because that was the $20 I was going to pay for the ring. So I figured I was now square with karma.
“Then a weird thing started happening that week. I started misplacing my money. Not too much, because I don’t really handle that much physical cash and coins these days. Who does. There are just a few places where I use actual money—like the flea market—because that’s all they’re set up to take.
“But it happened a few times. I remember pulling out a stack of quarters for the laundry in my building. I was in my apartment, just getting things ready, and I completely forgot where I put the coins. One moment I was jangling them in my hand, and the next time I thought about them, they were gone. I looked to see where I set them down and checked all over my apartment but couldn’t find them anywhere. So laundry would have to wait until I had another 8 quarters.
“Then later that week I misplaced a $20 bill I had intended to give my nephew for his birthday. I was getting the money, the card, the pen and the envelope together, and the next thing you know, the money wasn’t there.
“At this point, I was just chalking up these incidents to me being absent-minded. Then the thing with my rent happened.
“My landlord gives you a 5% discount for paying cash, and a 5% discount for paying three months ahead. So I went to the bank and withdrew the money for the next three months rent. The teller put the money in an envelope and handed it to me. I put it in my bag and went home.
“Later that day when I went to go pay my rent, the envelope was there, but it was sealed and empty. I was fucking freaking out. I didn’t understand what could have happened. Was this a different envelope? Did I lose the one with the money? Did the teller switch the envelope and keep my money? That seemed like a crazy idea. Certainly I would have noticed putting an empty envelope in my bag rather than one with $2900 in it. But I just couldn’t come up with an alternative hypothesis. I went to the bank the next day and they even went to the trouble of showing me the security footage which clearly showed the teller placing the money in an envelope and me putting that full envelope in my bag.
“I didn’t know what to do. I was going to have to transfer some money around just to have enough to pay this month’s rent. But that was going to take a few days to get that sorted out.
“A couple days later I was driving by that flea market again. And it hit me that I’d been having all these issue with money since I got this ring. I convinced myself, as silly as it sounds, that the ring was bad luck. And so I turned my car around and drove back to the flea market, because I needed to at least eliminate that possibility.
“I was thankful to see the old woman and her grandson at that same table in the flea market. I walked up to the and told them some story that I had ‘accidentally’ put the ring in my pocket the previous week. ‘Blah, blah, blah. I’m so sorry. I just wanted to give the ring back. Blah, blah, blah.’ But when I went to take the ring off, it wouldn’t come off. It was stuck.”
You hold your hand out and pull on the ring, grimacing a little.
“It was weird because I knew I had removed the ring from my finger originally when I thought about buying it. But now it was stuck.
“As I tried to remove the ring, the woman said something to the young boy. He turned to me and said, ‘That’s your ring now.’ I told them that no, I didn’t want the ring. And I wasn’t going to take the ring. With all the money I had lost recently I certainly couldn’t pay $80 for it now. The boy was rapidly going back and forth translating between me and the woman.
“‘I don’t want this!’ I said
“‘It’s yours,’ said the boy
“‘I’m not going to pay for it,’ I said.
“The boy tells that to the woman and she smiles and says something back.
“‘Yes you will,’ the boy said, calmly. ‘But the price has gone up.’
“I asked him what that meant. He grabbed a pencil and a pad of paper from near the cashbox on the table.
“‘50,000,’ he said, and wrote down 50,000 on the pad. ‘Minus the $2942 you’ve paid. So…. $47,058,’ he said, and circled that number on the pad.
“I was so confused. Did they think I was going to pay $50,000 for this ring? And what was $2942? And that’s when I realized that was the amount of money I had ‘misplaced’ over the course of the week. But I wasn’t misplacing it, of course.”
“‘At 50,000, the ring comes off,’ the boy told me.
“So that’s why I’m not carrying cash these days… because somehow the ring is taking what is owed.
“And, as I’ve been coming up with a plan to live my life completely cashless, and the inconveniences of that, I’m haunted by what the kid told me before I left. He said, ‘Good news. In the near future we’ll be set up to take debit and credit.’”
You sit back in your chair and shrug your shoulders. “So that sucks,” you say.
“Do you want to see?” you ask. “Do you have a quarter or something?”
You borrow a quarter and place it into the hand with the ring. Moments later you open your fingers and the hand is empty.
Of all the magic powers a person could pretend to have, the ability to make money vanish has got to be the fucking dumbest one. I mean, bending a spoon with your mind is pretty dumb, but at least you can unbend the spoon and still eat some bisque with it. But vanished money is just something of value that is no longer there. For such a fundamental effect in magic, you would think our presentations would reflect a better understanding of the symbolism of such an act.
Anyways, The Ring presentation described above came from the idea of wanting a context where money vanishing was something that was not wanted by the performer, but also something that wasn’t a surprise to the performer. I originally intended to use that story along with Joshua Jay’s Triad Coin trick, or something like that. But my friend has been using the story with a single coin complete vanish (using a Raven) and has been having a lot of success with it, so that might be the direction I go as well.
The presentation above is an example of what I’m calling:
The Campfire Story Performance Style
The idea behind this style is simple. It involves creating a detailed backstory for what would otherwise be a simple quick trick. This is a style I’ve used and had a lot of fun with in the past, but I never really codified it and recognized it as a different type of performance until now.
It’s not like a traditional type of story patter where you’re telling a story and illustrating it with your magic props, e.g., “These four jacks are the four thieves and this deck is the bank.”
And it’s not the same as the immersive style of presentation that I like, where the story is unfolding mostly in real time with the spectator as a participant, e.g. “I’ve heard this house is haunted. Let’s try something….”
This has the feeling of a campfire or ghost story. It’s a more performative style. For 5 minutes, or whatever, you’re just setting the stage. And it’s only in that last moment that the story gets pulled into the present.
The story should put the magic moment in a completely different context (or else what’s the point of the story). This story puts a coin vanish into a different context. Another example of this style would be The Passion of Donny Ackerman, which puts a straight-forward mind reading trick in a different context.
Now look, I agree with you that a simple coin-vanish—with no presentation at all—can be a beautiful piece of magic. I’m not saying you should always do this type of performance with a coin vanish, obviously. I’m just offering another potential style in which to present your tricks that might otherwise be fleeting miracles. The coin vanish by itself may look great, but that disconnected moment of magical beauty might not be enough for that moment to stick in people’s minds long-term. It may make sense—sometimes—to build to that moment, and the Campfire Story Performance Style is one way you can do so.