The Adequate Blog

… I’ve been doing this show now for going on eight years, and in a quiet moment I started to think over how the act itself has changed. Part of this was brought on by my re-viewing the Last Day of my First Year video on Yahoo! Video (caution: long).

For one thing, the actual materials I use have changed.

When I started out, the majority of what I did involved rope. Now, rope is inexpensive, packs relatively small, and can take up an awful lot of space… so I had

• A color changing rope
• The Professor’s Nightmare
• The linking ropes
• The Coat of Loki
• Professor Fun’s Rope Trick (or what I call 24 feet of rope and some underpants)
• and for a little while, Tenkai’s Decapitation performed with rope

As my show progressed, I started using some other props

• An appearing pole
• The Disarmed box trick
• The linking rings (a gag which supplanted the linking ropes entirely)

… all of which was in a big, solidly built and heavy wooden box. So things were getting heavier.

Later on, I acquired

• Total Recoil (or how to put that pole away back in the box)
• The Crystals…OF MYSTERY! (ooo!)
• A smaller wooden box
• Several tables (”Look! I have furniture!”)
• A Lota Bowl
• Steel Animal Traps
• Peter Loughrain’s Iron Garotte as my finale

… and things got even heavier.

In 2005 I acquired the unfolding table of wonder which I still use… so now I had that plus… all the other stuff above. The next year I worked the Caliveras Celtic Faire, and it snowed. A lot. So I was hauling the table, and the box, full of heavy stuff, up the hills, in the snow.

… so I started working toward a lighter set. One that would pack down and travel easily.

• The pole went away
• So did the Lota bowl
• The box got smaller (a wooden toolbox, in fact) and acquired an aluminum base
• I started doing things with paper napkins

but… that wasn’t quite working for me. So right now I have …

• A leather “gladstone” bag for all the stuff
• A table and aluminum base which goes in the bag
• The Crystals… OF MYSTERY
• Rope
• Scissors
• Eight feet of Chain
• … and assorted infrastructure.

… however, the amount of stuff I have geared toward improving my environment is beginning to outweigh the amount of stuff I have to actually do the magic tricks.

… weird.