August 26th, 2010
If you plan on doing Mentalism, I want to share with you a very important concept you need to be aware of. It is a concept that is used in many mentalist or mind reading routines. The concept is known as “Magician’s Choice”.
Here’s how ii works, suppose you present a volunteer with an array of choices. It could be you just want to demonstrate that you can read their mind. Using the concept of “Magician’s Choice” you can do it easily.
With “Magician’s Choice”, it appears a spectator is getting a free choice, however, they are choosing exactly the item you want them to choose.
For example, you put five different ($1, $5, $10, $20, and $100) US bills on a table. Suppose you want them to select the $5 bill.
Ask them to point to two of the bills. If they point to the $5 bill then keep that bill and the other one they pointed to. If they didn’t point at the $5 bill, then discard the two bills they pointed at.
Now there should be two or three bills left. Ask them to point to one. If they select the $5 bill then discard the ones they didn’t point to. If they didn’t point to the $5 bill, discard the card they pointed at.
You keep doing this and by process of elimination, the item you want them to select will eventually be the only item left. By using “Magician’s Choice” you can force any item on a spectator to make it appear that you read their mind.
Only do this once in your routine, or the audience may catch on to what you are doing.
To read more about “Magician’s Choice” and other sneaky ways to read people’s mind, I highly recommend you read Master Mentalism: http://www.magicwill.com/mastermentalism.html
June 4th, 2010
Costumes can be quite costly these days. This means you should try to make them last as long as possible. Caring for your costume will help keep it looking like new for many years. I have a roman soldier costume and will refer to this item in the following paragraphs to teach you how to properly care for you own costume.
The first area you should look into after wearing your costume is cleaning your costume. You will want to remove all dirt and sweat so that your costume will be ready for wear the next time you need it. Here are some general tips to use when cleaning the various types of costumes you might own.
When cleaning cloth, make sure you read the tag to determine how it needs to be cleaned. When a tag says “dry clean only”, you should take its advice and bring it to a dry cleaner. Some costumes should not be cleaned at home and others can, you just have to read the tag to find out.
Washing down a metallic costume will be more intense than placing a cloth costume in the washing machine. The roman armor I use for my medieval soldier costume has a large amount of metallic pieces to clean between wear. This metal is not stainless steel and will rust if it is not dried properly. What I do when cleaning the metal is to use a wet paper towel to scrub the metal and then dry it off with a dry paper town. The reason I take these steps is to make sure that all metallic pieces stay in optimal condition.
Costumes are not invulnerable and do need to be mended from time to time. Cloth can be repaired using a good seamstress or a needle and thread for the skilled costume owner. My strategy is to find an exact thread match to bring to my local seamstress. This plan ensures that she will not mistakenly use a thread that does not match up correctly.
Repairing parts of the costume that are not made of cloth can be much more difficult. You may want to contact your seller or manufacturer and explain to them which pieces are broken so they can sell you an exact replica of the damaged piece. I once put a dent in my roman armor and found out the hard way that it could not be fixed by banging the dent out with a hammer.The last area you should look into is costume storage.
You will want to make sure that you store it with cedar so that moths will not destroy the fabric. Remember that moisture can be just as bad as moths so be sure to keep your costume dry as well.