One of the things I have always loved most as a magician is hanging out with other likeminded magicians and jamming. That is, improvising and playing with effects on each other where none of us know where it is going. Maybe one of us forces a card, but the person selecting it had already palmed out a card and switched it in for their selection. They then pass off the forced card to another friend who loads it into the forcing magician’s bag without their knowledge to be used later in the effect or simply found minutes, hours, or days later with a confused grin. Meanwhile someone else has stolen the rest of the deck and replaced it with a different backed deck, but with a cover card to hide the switch. The effects end up being elaborate, confusing, silly, and most of all surprising because no one can ever keep track of everything that happened. This has always been the most fun since it is magic at its most organic and honest. It’s kind of like a jazz ensemble improvising together: incredible in the moment, but impossible to recreate or bottle, and very hard to share with anyone not taking part.

     This post unfortunately does not end with a clever idea, but instead an open question: how we take this more honest, spontaneous, and relaxed experience of magic to non-practitioners?

-- Z.Y.