My family knows I am interested in magic and someone suggested I could do a magic show for his son. I brought it up again and he sounded interested but not committed. I wonder if anyone on the Café could be willing to point out some things for me.

As I told Dick Oslund, I can't teach what I don't know. I have a lot of great ideas but I don't know where to head with them.

One of the ideas. I want to start the show with an "endless bananas" type trick. I think it might get children interested if I told them that My name is Nicholas and that it rhymes with something green and salty that comes in a jar and goes on hamburgers. And then, when they guess, I could produce a pickle and put it in my pocket, producing another pickle. (ages would be around 3-6.)

My sources for material have been Eric Sharpe's specialized Children's Entertainment and "Doing Magic for Youngsters."

Another idea I have. I want to put a handkerchief on a type of pull and continually make it disappear. I think that it would be a repeating trick that could lead to "5 minutes with a pocket hank" and following that, I thought it would be fun to build a complex prop that would make the handkerchief seem to come alive when I am not looking. The point would be that I could finish the mischief by putting the hanky in my coat pocket and then proceed to read from a book about ghosts. Whenever I put the book down near my chest, a handkerchief could pop up behind the book and bob back and forth. This is the kind of thing I read about a lot in children's magic.

Other than that, I have a table built for a hat production. The idea is that I do a load of laundry in my hat and end up producing silks and sponge balls. If I had a rabbit I would also produce a rabbit in the show. The reason is that Eric Sharpe has a routine in his book using a drawer box and a breakaway wand and little else which sounds hilarious. The rabbit goes into a gift box with no bottom. The magician carries the gift box away and the children would see the rabbit still on the table. Also, the breakaway wand bit seems like it would have children laughing.

My approach is to use the outline the Eric P. Wilson wrote up in his book. He suggests a series of effects that have certain entertainment characteristics, like making kids laugh, or getting them loud, or just being magical, or one for the girls/one for the boys.

In fact, Eric P. Wilson's part of the book suggests a comedy barber routine for a boy, wherein the magician cuts the boys hair with a pudding bowl as a guide, and when the bowl comes off it looks like the boy is bald.

So, I have enjoyed doing the research and planning and I have in mind a lot of effects that would mean building finicky parts, like for instance a large book that is able to animate a hankerchief behind it. Or, I also thought it would be neat to pretend to be camping and light a "campfire" in a tophat using one of those fans that blows orange silk flames around.

Well, that is it for now.