Jerx Christmas - Alvo Stockman - 6:48 PM

I’m really excited. The girl I’ve been seeing the past few weeks just showed up. She grew up in this area. She’s home for the holidays, but now she’s a hot-shot lawyer in Philadelphia. While me… I’m just an overall-wearing, plain-speaking, ruggedly handsome guy who enjoys the simple pleasures. I’m trying to teach her not to let life pass her by. We’ve made hot cocoa, had a snowball fight, and watched the elementary school’s Christmas pageant in the town square. She’s really loosening up and becoming that joyful girl she once was.

Everyone is saying our relationship is like a Lifetime Channel Christmas movie. 

I guess it kind of is. 

I hope she continues to fall for me and starts to really trust me. Then I can turn this relationship into another type of Lifetime movie.

Right after my girlfriend walked in, I spied a face I hadn’t seen in a while… Alvo Stockman!

I walked over to and asked him what he had been up to recently. He said, “The biggest project I've been working on the last few years was DragonScale.  I took time to patent it, get it FCC and CE certified, trying to "do it right" which takes much more than a year, and strangely all in the last 3 months a few other scales came out all at once.  Each of them looks like one of our early prototypes.”

“No, no, no,” I said. “That’s what your alter-ego, Acar Altinsel, owner of Penguin Magic, is doing. I want to know what Alvo Stockman is doing”.

Do you know who Alvo Stockman is?

Whenever anyone asks me if there are any other books I can recommend that are similar to the informal style of casual magic I write about frequently, my usual answer is, “No. I wish there was.”

But 15 years ago, Alvo Stockman did release a few effects that likely influenced me more than I knew. They were tricks that often took place hanging out casually, perhaps in a coffee shop. And the methods didn’t prioritize “pocket management” or “reset time.” 

He had one trick where part of the method involved going to the bathroom and burning a mix CD during the middle of. It was right up my alley.

I think you will see a similar overlap in our thinking with the gift he brought tonight. I’ve often written about the idea of messing with people’s minds by playing with their understanding of how magic tricks work. Most people think magic is either sleight-of-hand, or a trick deck-of-cards or something like that. So, sleights or gimmicks. And they think that, because…well, it’s true. A lot of magic is those things. The problem is, that causes people to just write off the tricks they see as being one of these mundane solutions. “I don’t know how it was done, but it was just sleight-of-hand.” “That’s some kind of special coin, I bet.” That’s their solution. By playing around with their understanding of magic methodologies, you can force them to consider a more “magical” world beyond “sleights and gimmicks.”

Alvo’s gift will help you do that. It’s a concept he calls Dupes. Dupes are fake magic instructions that go along with real magic tricks. You print them out and you can read from them as you do the trick or just leave them around to be found. So maybe you vanish a coin for someone sometime, and later on they find the instructions that come with the coin vanishing gel you bought. “That’s how it’s done?” 

In the attached pdf you’ll find a few different “Dupes” and at the end he describes the actual tricks they go along with. 

Click the package below for Alvo’s gift…