The vanishing red silk is a classic effect in magic. We’ve all been giddy after getting away with using that ugly plastic thumb for the first time. (Try reading that sentence out loud and out of context.)

This presentation gets rid of the silk and justifies the vanish of the item, the item itself, and its reappearance. If you have the thumb tip on you, you can get into this practically anywhere and anytime without also carrying around a silk. The times that I’ve performed this presentation, I’ve received pretty great reactions. I also found it easy to get into.

Let’s imagine that while fiddling with a small Post-it note (keep in mind, this could be a tissue, piece of paper, or anything you could write a note on) you start to tell your friend some bullshit.

“In a prison, there were inmates that wanted to pass notes to each other invisibly. They couldn’t talk about secret business in front of the guards. They devised a way to hide a note on their body in an incredibly stealthy way. Nobody ever got caught. For them it was just a handy technique to use in everyday life. I heard about this from someone who served time in that prison and as a magician it fascinated me, but I had no interest in sleight of anus. I think telling him that was the only reason he told me the real method, which I was delighted to learn involved no sleight of anus. I’m still working on it, do you mind if I practice it with you? Here, write or doodle on this note for me.”

After they finish marking the note, you take it back and while talking start to slowly shove it into your closed fist.

“Say I just discovered this note under my lunch tray. I wouldn’t read it on the spot, that’s just asking to be caught. First, I’d hide it in my fist like this. I know, this looks painfully obvious. Imagine I was going to get a pat down right now from the guards, the worst possible time… It’s gone. I hid it.”

Make sure to mention that it looks obvious at first, but in reality you can show your hands empty as if you were being patted down. The moment you finish explaining, you open your hands up to show that the note has vanished.

“The thing is, to read the note in the safety of my own cell I need to be able to bring it back whenever I want to.”

Here you produce the note and ditch the thumb tip in the way you feel is best.

“This is an underground technique, I’m working on using it for bigger items so I’ll let you know when I get a better handle on it.”

This can be used as part of a larger routine, with different methods. The vanish and reappearance is congruent with the story, and the story gives you the perfect opportunity to follow up with another trick that involves a vanish. This would be a great setup for a bigger, grander vanish.

“Remember that secret note passing technique I was practicing a while ago? I figured out a way to do it with slightly larger objects. Let me try this beer bottle here. Yeah, that’s not going to work, a bit too big. Let’s use something smaller instead.”

Then you do a topit vanish.

I was inspired to think of a different presentation for this classic trick by way of an old anecdote.

Once, a magician did the classic silk trick, but with a blue silk instead of a red one. Just the fact that it was done with a blue silk was apparently enough to fool the other magicians who watched the performance. They associated the red silk with the packaged thumb tip product. The moment they saw a blue silk, they assumed a thumb tip was not used.

You may have heard this anecdote before. I thought it was amusing, and I squirreled it away.

One day when I was riding the bus, I noticed there was a Post-it note on the floor. By the time I got off the bus, I had come up with the skeleton of this little presentation. The blue silk story inspired the idea, but the purposes that the two presentations serve are different.

Obviously, this probably won’t fool a magician, but it creates a structure for the same classic trick that would actually make sense in the real world. Reworking classic effects into presentations that are congruent with real life can be challenging, but it’s rewarding. It’s an exercise I implore you to do, as you’ll never run out of effects or ideas.

Open up your Tarbell or Annemann, and see what effects you can bring to our modern world.