Ok, I was at my friends house yesterday and he showed me this website where you can just ask for the secret of any magic effect you want and the people who know it actually reveal it! I mean, they have things from Zero Gravity to Jay Sankey's Dough.

Can't anyone keep the code?
Michael

Mmm... hassenpheffer

Ahh! Keeping the code! that's where the masked "magician" comes in!

Ah, well. As trite and corny as it may sound, the real secrets of magic aren't so easily learned by people who don't take the time to . . .um . . . learn them. Harry Blackstone used to do an appearing goat illusion. The "secret" was that he picked up the goat under his arm and rushed onstage waving a shawl in front of it. When he stopped waving the shawl, the goat appeared. Really high-tech technology there. When Herbert Becker first started the big exposure trend, David Copperfield was quoted as saying something like, "We're not rocket scientists; this is entertainment!" It is distressing that some people have no sense of ethics in such things, but it doesn't really hurt us as much as it seems.

Yeah, I do sometimes wonder if people remember the stuff Becker exposed two or three months later. You know, human memory is a fallible thing.

But the problem is, though, that you don't really know which secrets people remember and which ones they don't. What I didn't like was that I felt compelled to sit in front of the T.V. to watch the baboon so I could know which effects to remove from my act next day. Now that part DID hurt. And it hurt greatly.

And then to rub salt in your wounds, that knucklehead Mitch Pellegi just had to stand back and make sarcastic comments something akin to "There! SEE? I told you there was no such thing as magic! Ha, Ha!" (At this point, imagine a little kid sticking his tongue out) that's about all the maturity these people manifested. Honestly, I felt as if they wer'e taking a sharp stick and jabbing it in my side.