After wowing last year with his show “The Cult of Dave”, David Alnwick returns to Nottingham Skeptics in the Pub with a new show “Mind Wizard”, a mix of magic and mentalism.
Dave starts with a card trick – getting three members of the audience to select a card from a deck and proceeding to identify the cards. He gets two out of three correct, which, as Meatloaf points out, isn’t bad and the one that he got wrong, he said it was a three instead of a four. We then get a brief history lesson about how Dave first started doing card tricks in sixth form, just playing games. One day he walked in of some of his schoolmates playing cards and told them that wherever they stopped dealing the next card would be the 4 of clubs. He was right but it was a total guess!
He also asked a girl at school if she’d go out with him if he could guess her phone number. Her jaw dropped when he got it right but she’d given him a fake number. Back to the show and another audience member is invited to play nought and crosses. The game tends to be a draw with two competent players as it turns out here. Prior to the game, Dave had drawn something on a whiteboard and when they had finished playing he revealed it – he’d correctly predicted the locations of all of the noughts and crosses. To change the game up a bit, he then gave the audience member two cards, one with “X” printed on it and one with “O”. Rather than thinking of “X” or “O”, she is asked to think about “red” or “green”, then she selects again and has to think of “food” or “water” and a final time where she has to think of “cookie” or “crisps”. After correctly identifying which card she had selected all three times, Dave retrieves a box from the audience containing a fortune cookie in a green wrapper – she had selected “green”, “food” and “cookie”.
Next up, four more people are chosen from the audience and are each asked to draw a picture. Dave has to lay down some rules at this point as the first time that he did the trick all four people drew cocks. He correctly matches the first three pictures to their drawer (including the “is it a tree, is it a nuclear explosion” picture) Obviously, matching the final picture with the audience member who drew it would be easy at this point. Instead, without looking at the picture, Dave draws his own and the big reveal of both shows that they match.
As those four people retake their seats, another three are selected and given free choice of what they would like to wear – a hat, some comedy glasses or a scarf. They were then each given an envelope with a number on it, either “1”, “3” or “4” with Dave taking “2”. They then stand in order in front of a coloured piece of card on the floor. Dave stays where he is while the other three mix themselves up, ending up in the order “3241”. Dave opens his envelope revealing it contains the number “3241” The other three open their envelopes to reveal that Dave had predicted which item of clothing they would be wearing and which colour they would be stood in front of (although he gets two of the colours wrong – as he says, “shit happens”)
The penultimate effect sees Dave borrow a £10 note from a member of the audience. This is then given to another audience member along with five envelopes, each containing a piece of paper the same size as the money. He leaves the room, replaces one of the pieces of paper with the cash and then seals the envelopes. Dave calls him back into the room and then takes the envelopes one at a time and rips them up, leaving just the one with the money in it and a very relieved audience member who got his £10 note back.
And then it’s onto the finale – throughout the show, a small box with a 4-number combination lock on it had made its way around the audience, with everyone having a go at trying to get it open. As it makes its way back to the front, a mobile phone is commandeered from someone in the audience and is then passed around for people to enter digits or mathematical functions to generate a random number – 41225 (clearly not the code for the box) In fact the code for the box come from the first trick of the evening, the three cards, a “5”, “Q” (representing 12) and a “3”. Inside the box is a folded up card – the “4” that the audience member actually picked rather than the “3” that Dave predicted and a note apologising for not having the number from the calculator. Then it’s time to open the fortune cookie and inside that there’s a piece of paper with a number on it – 41225. Cue an audience going wild and lots of people asking, “how did he do that?”
After the show, the audience are treated to a Q and A session that quickly becomes an impromptu magic lesson, where we are all shown a card trick from Dave’s new book SIX SIX SIX. The key point to performing good magic is answering the challenge, “what’s the point?” To this end, Dave tries to stay away from the old staples such as pulling a rabbit from a hat as it has no real world applications. With all magic, if you can do it well, you turn it from being a trick into being an experience. If you make a mistake, most of the time people won’t actually realise but if anything does go wrong, it’s the magician’s fault. There is no pint in blaming the audience. Then Dave give us the key revelation – Magic is lying! The best magic occurs in other people’s heads and it’s not a trick until you make it a trick. With that, we head out into the night, with Dave’s words ringing in our ears, “Don’t let Britain’s Got Talent dictate what gets famous”
Nottingham Skeptics in the Pub returns to The Canalhouse on the 5th of December where Stevyn Colgan will talk on “Mr Green and Mr Grey Won’t be Visiting us Today” For more information, visit the SitP website: http://nottingham.skepticsinthepub.org/
Words and photos by Gav Squires
@GavSquires
