I am wondering if you've had any embarrassing moments when you've been performing, particularly with children (but could also be adults). Have you any tricks that have gone wrong? How did you recover? Just interested.

I consider the best recovery to continue as if it didn't happen. Half will think it's part of the show,
and most the rest won't care.

One time I was doing my bubble bag routine (similar to egg bag), and the kid got the idea to feel around. "I feel something
in there!" "You do? Well, take it out!" The crowd had no idea there was supposed to be more routine.

Nearly every story I have is continuing as if nothing went wrong.

I had the Card Frame screw up on me once. The card didn't shoot up into the two plexiglas holders. The children and my little helper knew something messed up and just laughed their little heads off at me! I played it off as well as I could and just moved on. Luckily, I was in front of a bunch of children who I performed for many times so they were quite forgiving! That being said, I never used the Card Frame again! I prefer the Lasso card trick for the kids these days.

Not a specific trick...but a whole show: my first (and only) kid's birthday party. When I was 17, owner of local magic shop I'd hang out at referred me to somebody looking for a magician looking for an 8 year old party. They didn't want to pay much, do he passed but thought I might be interested. I'd no desire to do a kid's show, but felt "honored" he thought of me and figured if I'm doing magic I should get out an perform.

I put together a collection of tricks I had, using patter straight from the instructions. No thought about flow, connection, or even if it'd be interesting for an 8 year old. I had no clue about audience management (let alone wrangling kids).

I show up, Mom is with other wives in the kitchen, a few dads are drinking in back yard. About 10-12 kids are running amok, fueled by cake and candy. They had no interest in sitting down for a pimpley faced nerd in a denim vest (it was the late 70's). Finally I get enough of them to sit to start the show. But those running around would go behind me to see the secrets, one grabbed my stuff. Every trick was met with "I know how you did that!" or "I see that!" All this had me rushing through everything to get it over with. When I did my final tricks, the kids shot out like greyhounds released for a dog race...

Walking outside the Mom grudgingly handed me a check for $25 while muttering under her breath. I told her to keep it...and left.

Since then, only kids shows I did were for my own children and their friends (before cake was served).

Yes, the first and only time I did Bob Reads bottle production the bottle slipped down my pants down to my shoe and I had to just play it off as a weird gag. It turned out to be no big whoop, but as it was slowly slipping down I was nervous trying to figure out what to do. I created a pocket for it so it wouldn't happen again, but never got around to trying it again. I did Hobson's Balloon Bag today, and the dog was mostly deflated when I pulled it out, never had it deflate/fall apart that much before. I just said, oh well, that didn't work as planned and moved on. That one is sort of risky cause balloons are unpredictable so I don't like to wait too long after I make it before doing the trick, if it's going to me more than an hour I usually don't bother making it.

I once tossed an extinguished "sparkle" match (the kind that have sparkle additive on the match head so it "sparkles" and burns off and the match continues to burn). I blew out the match and tossed it into my case. As I tossed it into the case, it re-lit (like one of those birthday candles that re-lit after you blow them out) and the match ignited the rest of the flash paper I had in the case. Crowd thought that was part of the act, I had to change up that show on the fly. Lesson learned, never used sparkle matches again.

Long time ago, I had a piece of lit flash paper fall down into my shirt pocket setting off the whole packet of flash paper. It caused me to jump around patting my chest with smoke coming out for a minute or so. I didn’t really know what to say other than ‘I’ll do anything for a laugh.’ At that time, I guess I thought it was best that they saw me as being crazy and not stupid. Lesson learned for me with flash paper.

Tom

Split my pants right before show time.
Had to rework my show to keep my best side forward.