Until July...
/Waddup, ding-dongs?
This is the final post for June. Regular posting resumes Monday, July 3rd. The next issue of the subscriber newsletter comes out on July 1st. If you’re a supporter at the $25 level and you have an ad you’d like to get in for this month, try to get it to me within the next week.
One evening, I was standing outside a bar with some friends on the sidewalk in NYC. I borrowed my friend’s cigarette and pushed it through my fist. When it came out the other side, I said that it had gone back in time one puff. It was a little longer now, could he see? Then I pushed it through my other hand and it disappeared completely.
“Now it’s gone back in time five minutes, to the point when it was unsmoked, and it’s now back in your pack. Check it out.”
My friend opened his pack. “No, it’s not,” he said. “I still have three in here.”
Uh-oh, he knew how many cigarettes he had in his pack before I made that one disappear.
The funny thing about cigarettes is they’re not very expensive, but if you take one out of your friend’s mouth and toss it in a puddle, they get really mad at you.
So vanishing my friend’s cigarette without his permission had him annoyed with me. How to rectify this situation?
“I had to do it,” I said. “That cigarette was the one that was going to give you lung cancer. I mean… not that one cigarette will give you cancer. But there’s a certain amount that will. And then there’s one less than that amount which won’t. And I had a vision that in your life you would be right over that line by one cigarette. And so I needed to make one vanish. I did it for you.”
“Oh well,” he said, and borrowed a cigarette from another friend of ours to make up for the one that was lost.
A few months later, he stopped smoking for good. One of the reasons he told me was that I’d poisoned his mind with the notion that there is some dividing line between having lung cancer and not having lung cancer, and one cigarette could push you over that edge. And he would think about that each time he had a cigarette.
This is the story about the time I may have saved someone’s life with a cigarette pull.
In other vice-magic news, a couple of people wrote in to ask how I vanished the condom in the story I mention in my 5 Things To Make Vanish post.
I don’t really know what the technique is called. I think I might have learned it in the Klutz Book of Magic, or something like that, when I was a kid.
You toss the item back and forth between your hands, and then you palm it or hold it back on the last toss.
There are better vanishes in the world. But for a spur of the moment vanishing condom trick, this worked well. The nice thing about this vanish is they’re being taken in by the rhythm of the vanish. This means you can do it with bigger items in low-light situations (e.g., a condom in a candle-lit bedroom) because what they need to pick up on to sense the vanish can still be seen in those situations. And even if the object isn’t hidden fully in your hand, it’s usually fine, so long as you can ditch it before the vanish because they won’t be able to catch a casual glimpse of the object in the dim room.
In this case, in the process of shifting my body positioning on the bed so my girlfriend could put her hands around my fist, I left the condom on top of the headboard.
I’ll see all your asses back here on July 3rd for National Eat Beans Day.
