We confess…

All of this distanced interaction and performance has us impatiently long- ing for a future time when we’ll be able to hand a physical object to our spectators.

In anticipatory celebration of a return to hands-on magic, we are sharing a personal favorite we’ve been keeping for ourselves.

The idea began while working with the folded Keno ticket force. Our first experiments quickly revealed that the digits did not have to be in numerical order for the method to succeed. The results of those explorations can be seen in our commercial release, Lucky Numbers.

We then wondered, “What if the informational elements were something other than just numbers? Maybe…letters?”

The result was a way to allow our spectators to make a series of free choices (which way to fold the paper, which letters to pierce, how to arrange the re- sulting letters to form a word) and still end up with a secretly knowable outcome that could be exploited for an apparent demonstration of mind reading.

Next came a deeper examination of the remaining elements on the page (Like the indigenous peoples of North America, we always look for ways to use every part of the Buffalo.) By adapting an ingenious methodology pio- neered by Ned Rutledge, we ended up with a single page, seemingly torn from a book of puzzles, with which we could present a variety of thought- reading demonstrations involving one, two or three participants.

We suggest that you print out the puzzle page so you can follow along with the materials in hand. When the time comes that you can leave the house and actually perform this for people, please take the extra time to print the page on newsprint and add one of the convincing images to the other side of your prop to complete the illusion of an innocent page torn from a book of puzzles. Word.

Duis Congue Vestrum Fac