I am fond of both of these classic effects — the Rice Bowls, and the variously titled Chinese Prayer Vase/Vase of Allah (the rope in the bottle) — but would really like to hear various creative presentational ideas, concepts, themes, plots, or patter options.

If you do either or both of them, how do you present and “sell” them? What stories do you tell, what pictures do you paint, what dramas do you walk your audiences through?

My answer to this has already been written up in The Wizards' Journal #29, called "Genii in the Bottle." This is not just one trick, but a combination of many old tricks built around the idea that a silk, on which a Genii is printed, appears and disappears in a bottle and does various other mysterious and mischievous things. Some of the old tricks recreated for the Genii to play with include: The Imp Bottle, The Prayer Vase, The Hoo-Coin, The Demuth Milk Bottle, Floating Bottle, Dancing Hank, Silk-Kola, Appearing and Disappearing Bottle and a "Magic Carpet." You know all of those old tricks? Think again! They've all been reinvented!

Very interesting — combining a series of little/short/one-off tricks into a longer and complex (multi-phase) blended single routine, unified by the interweaving thread of following the actions of the same single genie responsible for them all. I like it!

(I guess one could tie together an entire show into such a unified whole, if one wanted to, in the same or similar sungularly thematic manner?)

This actually WAS my entire (20 - 30 minute) Library show during my late teen years. I worked with the librarians to put up a display of their Aladdin books for the kids to browse through and read after the show was over. By the time the Wiz Kids came along, I was able to add the printing on silk so the Genii would have an image of the Wiz Kid's head - in this case Qua-Fiki's head is shown since I still had all of his stuff in the Wiz Kid museum.

A very interesting version of what you call "Chinese Prayer Vase" can be done with a clear plastic bottle a rope and something else. If your interested? let me know in the thread.

Along those lines, I have an effect from Warren Stephens called "Static Cling". It was like the prayer vase but used a clear drinking glass.