Because you say that this second elastic is a prison to hold The Houdini Elastic, it is a natural move to pull The Houdini Elastic up and show that it can’t come free of the Rubber Band prison. So, having the second elastic does this very well, plus it helped me come up with the escape idea and it also helps with a little psychology. You shouldn’t have to, so that is why it is suspicious when you do have to. After you put the elastic on your index and middle fingers, why touch it again.

And then the other problem was how to do the secret move without being obvious about it. When I first read about the elastic trick in a magic book many years ago, there was just one elastic and the patter went like this: “Take an elastic and put it on your fingers and with some magic dust it jumps to the other fingers.” Not a great story and I didn’t really care if an elastic jumped from two fingers to two other fingers. So, don’t be afraid to make up stories for your magic tricks. And again, in my Doc Century’s Magical Travelling Medicine Show, the ropes are used as an eye test for my audience patients. In one of my Hallowe’en shows, the ropes have been worms, part of a hangman’s rope, or bloody ropes when I use my red rope. In an Easter show, this time the ropes are a string from a magic Easter Bonnet. In a Christmas show, the ropes are from a magic Christmas tree garland.

I use the same rope trick, but I theme the trick differently. I have taken a simple transposing (when something moves magically) magic effect and created a Houdini escape!Īs a matter of fact, I use many of the same tricks in different shows I do. You can take any magic trick and make it new by making up a new story to go with it. But what I want to talk about in this post is the “story” you can tell when you are performing your magic for audiences. This is a classic of Magic Book Tricks for children. Just keep 2 rubber bands in your pocket and you are ready to amaze every audience, any time! Just like The Great Houdini, the elastic on your index and middle fingers will escape past the second guarding rubber band and land on your ring and baby fingers…then he will escape back into the prison of your index and middle fingers to demonstrate that no rubber band prison can hold The Great Houdini Elastic!

The great houdini magic tricks