Photo 1
Photo 2
Photo 3
The little finger (and only the little finger) controls the top card. The little finger holds the top card in place by the natural adhesion of the skin against the card; it straightens enough to allow the top card to lever up and then closes it back down once the second card has passed. The middle and ring fingers play no part in this at all.
When everything works right, this all occurs as somewhat of a snap. The first finger pulls the second card down and around in a quick continuous motion. The action is held back for a fraction of a second by the little finger and then the snap occurs nearly instan- taneously as the metering little finger allows the action to progress. You will amaze yourself when this occurs; it looks better from the viewer’s angle in front than it does to the person executing it. Correctly done, the second card seems to pass through the top
card in the manner of an optical illusion.
There is a final tip from Dai Vernon at the end of Mr. Ganson’s explanation that should not be overlooked, but I’ll leave you to find that on your own.
It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that if you are not familiar with the legitimate one-handed deal this false deal seeks to replicate, you will need to learn it first. I’ll mention in passing that while trying to learn this second deal I often inad- vertently flipped the second card free of the deck and onto the table. I subsequently turned this into a little flourish by learning to flip the top card 360 degrees in this manner. This minor conceit was published in Lewis Ganson’s last book, appropriately titled,
It’s 8 p.m. It’s dark. I’m near Detroit. I know. That’s scary enough.
The lobby of the Village Theater Performing Arts Center is packed with baby boomers, teens, and even little kids. Some of the kids are wearing costumes and some of the older crowd look to be costumed up like something out of a steampunk convention crossed with The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A twenty-some- thing woman leans over and asks her date, “What exactly is this show we are about to see?”
Her spiky-haired male companion replies, “I don’t really know, but my dad laughed when he saw a poster for the show, and told me I should go, and that he and his friends went to ‘spook shows’ as kids growing up in Flint. They were fun.”
Not really the answer his date was looking for, she asked, “Well, is it a movie, or is it like a play? Is it scary or is it funny?”
“I think both,” he replied, trying to play it cool. That sums up the expectations of most of the audience: they don’t exactly know what it will be, but they know it’s going to be fun. And a few, like spiky-hair guy, might realize it’s also a cool slice of show biz history brought into the present: the nearly forgotten and truly American tradition of the spook show.
Like virtually all smart (meaning “profitable”) theatre, the theatrics begin before the show itself. The vintage-style posters plastered on telephone poles, coffee shops, grocery stores, and retail shops throughout the town of Canton, Michigan, promised horrors from beyond the grave. Even the give-away of a “real
Dead Body” were simply too appealing – too intriguing – for this
crowd of nearly four hundred people to resist on a cool brisk fall
Michigan night.
But what is a “spook show” anyhow, and why doesn’t anyone today really know?
There were many variations of the spook show. The material presented and quality of the performance varied greatly. However, most of the traditional spook shows seemed to consist of a standard format – the live magic and illusion segment, a dark séance segment known as the “blackout,” and the showing of one or more feature-length horror films.
It was in the 1930s that a performer by the name of El-Wynn (Elwin-Charles Peck) created this basic show format, which would eventually become a big moneymaker during tough economic times. Starting as a mentalist and crystal gazer, El-Wynn eventu- ally put together a program of magic based on effects that spirit mediums were using at the time. This, of course, was in an era in which spiritualism was resurging, and such psychic “phenomena” was quite popular. El-Wynn concluded his act by devising a sort of mass séance in which audience members would be plunged into total darkness in the theater, and manifestations of ghosts and goblins would fly over their heads, literally attacking them in their seats. Until this point, most spiritualistic séances were done on a much smaller scale, and were taken as a genuine form of communication with the dead. They consisted of séance attendees hearing the voices of the dearly departed, as well as seeing ghostly apparitions and feeling cold breezes and even touches from spirits from the other side. But El-Wynn realized he could use these same effects on a much larger scale in a legitimate theater for enter- tainment – to give his audience a real thrill – and consequently