Matrix or Treats
/A few weeks ago I asked if anybody knew of any place to find foil-wrapped chocolate quarters that could pass for real quarters. After talking to a few people I think it's safe to say that no such product exists and would be somewhere between difficult and impossible to produce in mass quantities. This is too bad because I had a good idea for how I wanted to use them.
I want to tell you about the trick, because even as an aborted idea, I think it's still pretty good.
This summer I came up with a choreography for a matrix routine where -- in the process of the effect itself -- the coins you started with were secretly switched for four other coins. But what to do with this?
The idea of switching them in for chocolate coins really appealed to me because as much as I like very detailed, immersive presentations, I'm always looking for tricks that are so visually interesting and bizarre that they become like surrealist art, and they don't need a presentation. And this would have been one such trick.
Imagine you borrow four quarters, and lay them out in a square formation. Then you spread a deck of cards and have someone slide out any two. With the selected cards and the borrowed quarters you perform a matrix routine. When you are done you unwrap the "borrowed" quarters and toss the chocolate coins inside into your mouth. Then you pick up the two selected cards and fold them into your mouth, chew them, and blow a bubble with them.
That was the effect. I had the switch of the coins worked out. I had found a way to print card backs on thin sheets of bubble-gum, and had a simple switch worked out to ring these in for the selected cards at the end of the performance. The only thing I didn't have was the chocolate coins.
I'm now throwing the idea out to you. Perhaps you have coins in your country that would work. Or perhaps there's some way to make an edible quarter that isn't foil-wrapped chocolate. I don't know. Maybe this will inspire a whole FISM act for you, where you borrow all the props and then eat them at the end. Go ahead and use that concept. It wouldn't be the first time someone took my idea for their FISM act. (I'm looking at you, Cornel & Monique, 1964 FISM World Champions in General Magic. You know what you did.)