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I viciously burnt the side of my hand one summer, and it blistered up spectacularly. I had been working in a kitchen, and my hand slid onto the flat grill as I was cleaning it one day. It fucking sucked.
I had been quite sleight-of-hand dependent on my magic for years, and this was the first event that led me to explore “hands off” or “no sleight” methods. You see, someone close to me was on track to become a flamenco guitar legend, but unfortunately sliced half his hand off during his time in construction. So after this incident, dedicating years to a craft dependent on my hands spooked me.
I tried to revisit my go-to repertoire and see if I could replicate it without sleight of hand as a mental exercise. It’s not like I could create other methods using left-handed sleights (the plaster on my right hand was in the way most of the time and I’m not Slydini), but I thought it’d be a fun challenge to choreograph routines that gave my poor hands a break.
One summer evening, I decided to try out the effect Ghost Card by Fraser Parker. Without revealing the trick, it’s basically a clean writing peek you can do with a single gimmicked card. But how would I ditch the gimmick with my blister? Read on…
While having a movie night at a friend’s house, I pulled out a stacked deck to try out a mentalism piece.
First, I had her create a card based on her personality and birthdate. Once she had her personalized card created and named, I produced it via Mnemonicosis.
“Wow!” she said.
“I just want to do one more thing now. Pick a card, and write down a word that you feel summarizes yourself on the card.”
She did, and lost it in the deck while I wasn’t looking. I turned around and held the deck face up.
“This isn’t your card,” I said.
“No, it isn’t.”
“But imagine your word written boldly across the card that’s on the face of the deck. Imagine it’s your card, and that you’re writing it again.”
I stared into her eyes for a while, then squinted.
“…Ah, I think I just saw it that time. You’re thinking of butter.”
I roasted the shit out of her for the weird choice of word. It was a fun time. Then I got a phone call. Awkward interruption, but one of the things we deal with as social magicians. I just silenced the phone and put it away.
“Sorry about that.”
“Can I look at the cards?”
“You can keep them.”
She looked through the deck, and gave up looking for whatever she was looking for.
“This is one of my favorites,” she said.
What happened here?
You’re going to learn a fully motivated choreography to ring in or out gimmick card/cards while in a stand-up situation with no sleight of hand. This can be done with one to five cards. For the sake of explanation, I’ll teach it as a ditch, but you can easily reverse engineer it to do a load.
Suppose you’ve just performed a trick with a gaff card you want to ditch. You’ve got it on top of the deck above a pinky break.
Now you “get a phone call”. Don’t worry, I will share a method that doesn’t require a phone at the end.
All you do is set a timer on your phone for when you think the routine will end. You just have to make it falsely ring when you want it to. You want to be able to show the screen, so a fake Caller ID app is useful.
Let’s say you’re using an iPhone. Holding the deck in your left hand, you’ll pull the phone out with the right hand and pretend to be struggling to press the “Message” button on the left side of the screen with your thumb. After a beat, you’ll set the phone on top of the deck with the apparent goal of freeing up the right hand to press said button. This opens up a menu with autoresponses, which requires you to mess with the phone even more. That’s a good thing.
Since the phone is on top of the deck, the cards above the break are contacting the back of the phone. You then take your phone, as well as the cards above the break, and put everything away. You are using your phone as a stand-up “smuggler” if you will.
An important aspect is to offset the phone so it’s not fully covering the deck as soon as you have stolen away the needed cards. You place the phone flush with the deck, and immediately move the phone off the top of the deck to offset it as you dismiss the call. This is right before you put the phone away. The times I’ve done this, I’ve placed it in my back pocket, being careful not to flash the back of the phone.
You want to act a little embarrassed and apologetic. After the phone and cards have been put away, wait a bit, and see if your friend wants to check out the deck.
There you have it. A way to safely remove any card(s) with no palm, standing, and depending on what pocket you place the phone back in, even fully surrounded!
If you’re working with one card you want to get rid of and are so inclined, you can put a tad of sticky substance on the back of the phone to pick up the dirty card easier. This might make the ditch easier as well.
If you don’t want to use the phone, you could use your card box. You can bring the card box out as if you want to put the cards away. You can set the card box flush, then offset it like you would with the phone. You would then have a second thought, and decide to do one more trick. This is pretty much the standard way, for example Paul Harris’ Free Ride from Art of Astonishment book 3, but I wanted to include it for completion.
I realize a palm or cop will suffice for most of you. I invite you to think about the psychology of this ditch. The ditch takes place during an action that is seemingly irrelevant to the trick. No one has ever come close to suspecting anything when I have used this ploy.
I think part of the reason why is that there is a general social understanding that it’s pretty rude to stare at people’s phones while they are getting calls or messages. This can be taken advantage of with this ditch, as people won’t be paying super close attention to what’s going on (or will be politely looking away, even).
This ditch was born of a time of creativity and vulnerability. It was an easy way to achieve a clean ending. If for whatever reason you wish to have a no-palm method that takes advantage of being in a social situation, this is for you.