 THE JUMPING SIGNED BILL TRICK
ICKLE
PICKLE PRODUCTS
A spectator signs a dollar bill, then loans it
to the magician who places it in the center of a small silk handkerchief and
rubber bands it.
The magician
puts the silk bundle into a glass and covers the glass with a metal
tube.
A second glass
is placed into a second metal tube, located at a distance from the
first.
After a few
magic words, the magician lifts the first tube, the glass under it is empty. The
second tube is lifted. The second glass now has a handkerchief over it, rubber
banded in place. The magician lifts the handkerchief and the folded bill is seen
inside the glass.
Handing the
glass to the spectator, the rubber band and handkerchief are removed, the bill
is taken out of the glass. It is the same signed bill, none the worst for having
magically travelled through space and time.
Ickle Pickle
Products' 'Jumping Signed Bill' is one solution to a subtle technical problem
that has bedeviled stage magicians for quite some time: how can a borrowed
object, seen until the last moment in one place, suddenly appear in another
place and immediately be examined.
I'm not talking
about Card In Wallet or Bill In Lemon or Coin In Box. All of these reappearances
in an 'impossible' location employ vanishes that are somewhat foggy and rely on
directing the audience's attention away from the events taking place.
There is another
class of borrowed object transposition that aspires to a more definite change of
place. A good example is Okito's Tea Canister Mystery where a tea canister
containing a borrowed object disappears from under one opened ended cylinder to
suddenly reappear under another. The point being that until the last moment, the
object is in one place, then suddenly it is in another place.
Ickle Pickle's
solution to the technical issues involved are clever and while logic is
abandoned in dealing with the second glass (which must be turned mouth down
before being placed in the second tube) and the state of the rubber band and
silk (which are over the mouth of the second glass rather than around the bill
proper,) the overall effect is pretty good.
Frankly I doubt
if the spectators will pay any great attention to these discrepancies, since
their attention is on the signed bill which does, somehow, disappear from one
place and immediately appear at a distance in a second
place.
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