Magicians are creative people:  they have always been coming out with new presentations and tricks to entertain the audience.  Creativity is often known as thinking “out-of-the-box”.  March’s theme of “Out Of The Box” was therefore referring to both creative magic as well as tricks using a box or container.

There were 34 people at the usual BayView Hotel and among them were 2 guests.

The evening kicked off by Alvin Terence, who gave a demonstration of pick-pocketing using a borrowed deck of cards.  A card was chosen and then lost back in the deck.  The deck was shuffled by the spectator and then cased and placed in the spectator’s hip pouch.  Alvin explained that a skillful pick-pocket artist would take about 30 seconds to go through a typical wallet and search through the many credit cards to take out the card he wanted.  He reached into the spectator’s pouch and fished out the selected card from the closed case in less than 10 seconds flat!

Chew Liang Huat was next.  From a card box, he took out 4 playing cards of different suits and values.  They were placed back into the box.  When they were next withdrawn, they had changed into the 4 twos.  A spectator selected one of the twos – her card was the only blue back card while the other 3 twos had red backs.

Herman Yeo was one of two new members who took his magic induction test.  With delightful patter, he pushed a silk through a solid mirror, predicted a series of outcome when a spectator mixed a deck of cards face up and face down, and finally divined the total after a series of mathematical operations were carried out on a random 3-digit number chosen by a spectator.

The other new member who took the induction test was Jackson Lim.   The theme of his performance was “Small, Medium, Extra Large”, referring to the sizes of the various boxes of playing cards.  An assistant chose a card from a miniature deck of cards – this card eventually vanished from the deck.  A container with a die in it was shaken when the die magically changed into a folded playing card – the selected card.  Using a normal (medium) sized deck of cards, Jackson was able to instantly locate a chosen card lost in the deck.  Finally, Jackson had the assistant chose a card from a jumbo (extra large) deck of cards.  Every card had a number randomly written on it.  A blank piece of paper was soaked in a bowl of water.  An image of the chosen number eerily appeared on the paper.

There was a break of 15 minutes in which members ate and drank and had fellowship with one another.

After the break, Tang Sai Thong, gave some creative tips on using rubber bands in magic.  He also displayed the various types of rubber bands such as those made of silicone and those with different animal shapes.  Sai Thong then performed a miniature Tenyo illusion where a toy sword penetrated both a crystal box and a finger ring placed inside it.

Wee Kien Meng showed a stack of cards with different objects depicted on them, and was able to tell which object was eventually chosen by a spectator.  Lee Chong Jee showed how he could control the outcome of 6 dice each time they were placed inside a slim box and shaken up.  Gician Tan performed and then explained his own version of Spelling Bee, where a chosen card was located in the deck by simply spelling to its name.

Pambudi had several people wrote the name of their favourite playing card and sealed in an envelope each.  One of these envelopes was chosen and the name of the playing card inside it matched exactly a playing card he took out of a borrowed deck right at the start of the trick.

President John Teo performed a stage-sized Inner-Outer Boxes with the surprise appearance of a bag of tricks inside the boxes.  With this bag of tricks, John proceeded to do an Ian Adair effect where small objects such as playing card, thimble, coin, ball and a peg were individually transferred from one box to another, and he was able to disclose which one of the objects had a duplicate.

To round up the evening, Baharudin had a spectator cut a deck of playing cards to 3 piles of approximately 9 cards each.  To everyone’s surprise, the spectator had actually cut to the 4 nines, with the 4th nine appearing in the remaining talon.

Reported by Alvin Terence.