Come Out Flying

As avid readers of this blog know (and the 's' on the end of 'reader' is stretching it, I know...), when I was young I was an active practitioner of prestidigitation (magic to you). A couple of weeks ago we saw the movie, The Prestige. There's a series of scenes in the movie that depict the original working of the Vanishing Bird Cage illusion. In the original working of this trick a live bird was often killed for the sake of "art." In the movie, after seeing a performance of this trick, a young boy gets all upset about the vanished bird, wanting to know what happened to him, bemoaning his death, etc. Finally, the magician produces the bird (actually, a totally different bird. The original has been killed, you see) to "prove" that the bird is in fact fine. The boy, however, will have none of it. He's still very upset and asks, "yes, but what about his poor brother?".

The child was no fool.

This scene reminded me of something that often happened when I performed with live animals. Brian, Tom, and I did magic shows for senior citizen centers, and we'd use doves in productions, transmutations ("Dove Thru Glass"), and vanishes. For a finale, we'd usually do a double version of the Flip-Over Box effect, where two of us held identical boxes in which doves were placed before... voila... they disappeared.

Cue thunderous applause.

Except afterwards, at the senior centers and old folks' homes, there'd always be three or four old ladies who would get all distraught, worrying about what happened to the poor dear birds. We eventually learned that we had to show the doves again after the trick so the little old ladies would realize they weren't dead, disembodied spirits in the Ether, or what have you. This didn't make for good theater, but these people had lived through the depression and two world wars, for crissakes, so the least we could do was allay their worries about our performing livestock.

Which we did.

...to thunderous applause, followed by several deep, pretentious bows.

I never told the old ladies one of the Vanishing Dove tricks I saw performed. Basically, it involved my first dove, my mom's ferret, and a faulty ferret cage lock.