The Difference Between Magic And A Puzzle.

I had the strangest thing happen yesterday. Someone phoned and asked if we carried puzzles.

“What do you mean by puzzles?” I asked. Rubiks Cube is a puzzle. Could be a Jig-saw puzzle that he’s looking for.

Turns out he was talking about boxes that seem impossible to open and metal things that come apart, if you know how, etc.

We do carry a little clear box that you can’t open unless you know how. I also have something called Viz Escape that’s a puzzle. But that was the extent of my puzzles. Or so I thought. And I didn’t think about it any more until 5 minutes later a guy comes in and asks if we have any puzzles.

“Oh,” I said, ” you must be the person that just phoned me.”

“No,” he said, “I never phoned.”

So I was out of stock of the Treasure Box, mentioned above, and he wasn’t interested in Viz, which I think is excellent and only $3.50, but he was here in the store and I thought  that 3 ropes of 3 different sizes that all change to the same size is a puzzle. Right? You can hand them out. They can check them out.  It’s a puzzle. So I did a demo for him.

Are not many magic tricks puzzles?  When you can hand them out without them being able to discover the secret its a puzzle.

After my demo he said he knows how I did it. He used to do magic and he complimented me on my performance.

In the end he bought marked cards.  But it got me thinking. There are lots of puzzles in magic. How about Thumbcuffs?

So I have come to the conclusion that there are items that could be a puzzle or can also be magic. It all depends on the presentation.

Any thoughts on that?

A Classy Classic Magic Act

Once up on a time there was this fabulous magician …..and last week to be exact he walked into our shop, a retired magican but a magician nonetheless. He told me he used to be a famous magician from Paris and travelled far and wide but that was a long time ago.

Does the name Pat Gueller mean anything to you? I had never heard of him. He told me to google magic with pipes  or magie de pipes which I did and we watched it together. Now this show was performed maybe 40 years ago. Standing beside me Pat hummed the music that was played along with the act and his hands did exactly what they were doing on stage, without the props. He had it timed perfectly then and now.

After talking awhile it seems he had been in our shop years ago, across the hall when we had a bigger place but he had stopped doing magic now. He said he’ll be back soon. I’m wondering if he would give magic lessons. Is anyone interested?

 

Magic Memories

Some people are not only inspired but are also inspirational. Last week I wrote about Bobby Parisi and others. This week Bobby came to visit. He told us he was going to Japan and would be seeing Fukai. It reminded me that we knew Fukai. He had actually been to our home.

It was our tradition that after the week-end of Magie Montréal, a two-day convention run by Phil and Wim Vermeys for 19 years, we invited the out of town performers and dealers to our home for a buffet dinner from the Brown Derby. It was always a blast!

So I remembered Fukai with his umbrella act and was inspired to write about it. When he came into the dinning room of our home I was at the far end of the table and I called him to notice my tiny paper umbrella that usually goes into a drink of some kind, and brought it down beneath the table top for an second and came up with a golf umbrella.   Of course I didn’t intend to fool him, but I thought it would be a fun joke which I think he appreciated.

So when I told Bobby that and found the Program from 1990, and that Fukai and Kamika were there, he got creative. He doctored up our old progam which was amateurish to say the least but we were on a tight budget. Check out Réseau Magik and if you were an attendee at Magie Montreal, any of the 19 of them, you will see the difference. He made it look like a millions bucks! Too bad we didn’t know Bobby then!

 

 

The People You Meet In Magic Are Magic

Phil and I have been magic dealers for over forty years. In that time, as you can imagine,  people of all ages, of all colours, of all religions have come here to buy magic, personally, not just on line. There was no “on line” when we started. There is a deep brotherhood, or I should say  peoplehood, amongst magicians, as the women and girls in magic today are no longer magicians’ assistants but magicians in their own right. But I digress.

I wanted to bring out the fact that almost all of them are warm, fun loving people who love to bring a bit of fun into the lives of others. Some are extra special. Many are but the one I want to talk about today is Robert B. Breton Parisi, otherwise known as Bobby.

Besides being a magician, he is, in my opinion, a creative genius as well as an artist, interviewer, document maker and many other things and consider him my friend, our friend.

Without asking, he has translated some of my blogs into French. The latest one he did is the story of “Doug Henning and Phil”, which is a touching true story that took place when Doug Henning came to Montreal.  He did it beautifully  in two parts on the Réseau Magik Web on July 30, 2018, 1/2 and 2/2.

Throughout the years, many others have helped us with French translations as well, and I’m afraid to mention names as I may leave out a name or two but you know who you are and thank you. One I will mention, who was a competitor, imagine that in this day and age, but Le Grand Marcis, who had a shop and gave magic courses,  translated many instruction sheets for us just because he was a good guy.

A big thanks to all of you.