The theme and preparation for the day was all Impromptu Magic. Two weeks in a row before I was supposed to host the month’s meeting with our own Bernard Sim, I was travelling on Business. Although we wanted to plan and coordinate the day’s proceedings, nothing was don.e I had a plan to Interview Enrico during the meeting, a format I wanted to test. That too did not happen because at the last moment, Enrico could not make it for the meeting. So at 8PM on July 15th, the stage was really set for EVERYTHING IMPROMPTU. Nevertheless, we had an interesting meeting with many participations from members, and guests, too! We had Douglous Lee, Harapan Santoso Ong and Steven Sim as our guests for the evening.
Magic with everyday objects seemed to be the theme of the evening. We had Chew Liang Huat starting off the performance with knots on shoelace effect. This was followed by rowdy welcome for Bernard Sim who did his version of the torn and restored toilet paper with instructions on how to optimize limited resources as a magician, which had all of us laughing.
Breaking off from the impromptu theme, Lim Teck Guan came on with the Great Wong’s zig-zag deck of playing cards illusion. This was hand-made by the late Great Wong and is a collector’s item. The gimmicked deck of cards could be fanned widely before and after the effect.
The IBM Ring 115 takes pride in inducting members who completed the Induction Test which officially allows the members to be ordinary members of the club. The participants were Alexander Yuen, Tan Choon Kang, Jonathan Low and Donavon Tan. They read out the pledge and received the Ring Constitutions and a woken wand from our President John Teo. Congratulations, we officially welcome you to Ring 115.
Jeremy Pei ended the first half of the meeting with his dealer demonstrations of folding top hat, silk to egg plus, and a couple of latest effects: Turbo Stick and Remarkable. During the interval, members got to patronize Steven Sim, who will top operating his magic shop Supreme in October, and was selling his magic wares at affordable prices.
After the break, the impromptu magic theme resumed as Bernard Sim returned to teach the magic puzzle of releasing a rubber band from the tips of the fingers of both hands. Derek lee did a Max Maven’s effect by making the audience choose one of 4 fingers and a thumb, which happened to be the naughty middle finger.
The highlight of the evening was an interview I conducted (impromptu) with our visiting magician from England, Harapan Santoso Ong. He has created his own effects, and some were published in the Genni Magazine. He is well known for his essay on Cullology. He is presently studying physics in England, and he spoke about magic and magic lectures that he attended in Europe. Harapan then performed a deceptive force from a jumbled up deck of cards, and the production of 4 of a kind. Alexander Yuen followed with a sucker torn and restored tissue paper.
President John Teo did an interesting version of Woody Aragon’s effect where he had the entire audience tore up 4 playing cards and finally finding the perfect pair. Baharudin followed this with his version of the Ghost deck. A cased deck stood vertically on the table. A coin placed on its top would magically fall over at the will of a spectator, even though the performer was some distance away.
Inspired by the impromptu magic theme, the following younger members came up and truly performed magic at the spur of the moment: Jasper Lee, Jonathan Low, Donovan Tan, Hayashi Takuya, and Maxwell Low. Well done!
Jeremy Pei closed the evening with his own version of the Professors Nightmare, a very creative routine where he started with a single piece of rope, cut it into several pieces and finally ended up restored into one piece again. It was a fun-filled evening with lots of participations from our members.
Reported by
SATISH KUMAR
