Mission Impossible

Well, those folks at Warren Real Estate in Ithaca know how to have a good time, and it's great to see people who work together also have fun together. We had a blast and they loved the magic.

Some of the comments they made that stuck with me:

"Hey Kate, you have to see this! This isn't just 'pull a coin out of your ear' stuff... this is incredible!"

"Are you a vampire?"

"Hey, could you make our commissions increase?" (Sorry, I don't do requests.)

After one trick a guy said, "I know that how one was done! That's a mathematical card trick."

He made this comment after I let someone shuffle the deck, and then I dealt cards to the table while spelling the name of whatever Ace he wanted. I spelled A..C..E...o..f...C..L..U..B..S.. and put down one card for each letter. When I turned over the next card, it was indeed the Ace of Clubs.
I asked him how it could be mathematical if the deck was shuffled, and he started into a long and complicated explanation.

"Well," I said, "I'll tell you what. The deck is still in a randomly shuffled state, so why don't you name another ace?"

He named the Ace of Diamonds and I magically found the Ace of Diamonds in a completely different way. I did the same thing with the remaining two aces, finding each one in the shuffled deck as he named them.

"So much for mathematics!"

He wasn't offended by being proved wrong, and I think that's partly because he was a nice guy, and partly because of the way I present magic. For me it's not about proving that I'm a superior being with the power to fool people. I'm not trying to get one-up on you, I'm trying to create an experience of wonder and astonishment for you. I'm trying to put you into another world for just a few seconds, a world in which you get to experience all normal rules and laws being cancelled, a world in which you get to experience the impossible.

Someone actually said that last night: "That's impossible!"

"That's my job," I replied. "Mission Impossible."