I really enjoyed reading everyones posts. Some great stuff.

The hands down favorite story of mine..

Three years ago Six Flags asked us to put together our sideshow. This was a long time dream of mine that I had never been able to do. Typical sideshow stuff, fire eating, walking on glass, blockhead, eating a guinea pig, needle thru arm, escapes, bed of nails, etc.

Well one day we came into work and stopped by Human Resources. The lady behind the desk asked if we talked to our supervisor yet. We hadn't. She told me they recieved a call from a women wanting to compliment our show.
The women said she had a six year old son that had not talked in three years but after watching our show, the night before, he started talking again. The womens family wanted to thank us.

I don't know why the boy stopped talking but I would guess he started again because he had to talk about all of the freaky things he saw us do. What ever it was I will never forget that one.

Sillily, Will

I was working and did some tricks for a make-up girl. I kind of freaked her out by guessin her card right(forced) Then she just thougght of a card and asked me to say it out loud to prove it, ...well..it's the 2 of diamonds, she freaked out. After she stopped screaming I asked her if she knew a guy named Roy. Well she didn't. I was just saying the first name that came in to me. Turned out that she did not. Roy is not at all a commen name in holland. So I saved myself by saying. You will meet someone named "Roy" pretty soon. A week went by and I had a phonecall from a friend of hers. She told me that she was in a bar and a guy came up to her with his arms wide open, and greeted her. He said "hey how are you, this and that" it turned out to be an old friend friend from school. Now they are dating....and yes, his name is Roy.

Hi all
I am a new user as you can see ..this is a great forum indeed.
I don´t know if this is the most perfect story of all but happens yesterday-
I work in a restaurant doing table hopping.
The last table I did was a little controvesial...they were "thought".
When I do card tricks in general I do the clasic force whenever I can ,even if is not nessesary for the trick.
So I did this time..I turned around and told the guy to put back the card in the deck wherever he wanted.
While I was with my eyes closed I heard some quiet laughs ,and that is a sure sing of just one thing.They are not putting the selected card back in the deck but elsewhere,I half turned over just in time to see that the guy was moving his plate.
So ,I knew the card ,I knew that was under the plate ,and they didn´t know nothing of this.Inaff to do a little miracle don´t you think.
Well,that is what I did.Those people couldn´t beleive it, when I first guessed the card doing a little bit of lie detector they were still thinking :yeah ,but you don´t know that we hided the card"
So..I said ..mmm I am noticing something funny in the pulse reading aswell...Is the card in the deck?
-no
Is elsewhere ?
-no
Is in the deck?
Imagine the face of the guy when I moved his plate to show a beatifull card under it!

Oh well...life is beatifull I thought..and fair.
By the way ..you can induce this reacton in people sometimes on purpose.
Just tell them when you turn around..."put the card anywhere you want" without mentioning the deck..
They will get an idea and they won´t realize that you sugested to them.You will know if the card is not put into the deck but some laughs you will hear 100% of the times.
And with this information I think you can do very good things even if you don´t know exactly were they hided the card.

My perfect magic moment didn't happen in a magic show, it happened at my day job. My boss was out for the day and we needed to get into his office. I called the admin assistant who said she didn't have a key but she'd go down to office services and see if they had one.

In the mean time, the head of security (who sat in the office right next to my boss) overheard my phone call and came out with a key for me. About a minute later I hear the admin assistant coming. She has two GIANT rings of keys linked together. There had to be several hundred keys on them. Office services didn't have a marked key for her but they had all of these extras.

It was about this time that I remembered Chad Long's Ninja key/coin effect. I let her start trying a few keys, then took the massive thing from her, tossed it up in the air, caught it by one single key and unlocked the door. I tossed the keys back to her and walked in. The look on her face was absolutely priceless.

Scott

I love it when the perfect moment presents itself at a random time.

I was on a plane, and being a good little magician I was practising my card flourishes. A guy across the isle noticed and asked if I could do any tricks...well...I kept him and his friends entertained for the rest of the journey. Throughout the time I kept a recurring card theme, constantly bringing up the 3D. The guys loved this but the best moment came when we got off the plane. They got off ahead of me so as we were walking down the gangway I snuck up behind him and slipped the 3D into the pages of the book he had been reading.

I never got to see the look on his face, but the thought of it always makes me smile

I hate it when people resurrect dead threads but I've been wanting to tell this story badly and it fits perfectly in this thread.

Preface: I practice magic mostly for myself and so I don't perform for other people much (and only my friends and family at that). I've never really amazed anyone despite having pretty good sleight of hand

I have one friend in particular named John who is my "magic buddy" he isn't a magician but he is the one that I field test things on, in other words, he has seen me screw up every trick I know.

John and I were hanging out at his dorm the other night and I was fiddling with my cards and he asked if I had anything new to show him. I said "My pass has been improving" and demonstrated...completly blowing it and showing him everything (argh) so feeling a little dejected I started to pace and noticed that when I had pulled the deck out of the box one card had been caught by the flaps. I spun around and said "Quick john! Name a court card!" "Queen of Diamonds," said he. Well obviously I wouldn't be telling this story if it wasn't the Queen of Diamonds in the box. I set the cards down and gingerly lifted the box up with 2 fingers and tapped the card out. He was completely amazed (first time ever). The fact that there were no moves as such completely destroyed his sense of reality and I've been basking in it for the last few days. It's finally wearing out so I figured it was time to share it with you guys.

-Dan

About 1/2 a year ago I was performing for a friend of my fathers at his house where went to pick up some things.
I asked him to name a card, then I went to my your pocket to pull out the invisable deck and realised he had named the master card in my Svengali deck! I pulled that out instead and changed the whold pack to his card! He still goes on about it today!

"You've got to know when to hold 'em..know when to fold 'em....."

When I first started out in magic, my wife had a husband/wife couple come visit us. The talk got around to magic and I had my arm twisted (Yeh! Right!) to show them some magic.

I started off showing them Dia Verno's effect (I don't know the name) where you lay down five cards face-up on the table and mentally force them to pick one certain card. That went over well so, for my next trick, I did the effect where you riffle the deck in front of a spectator's face, have them freely memorize a flashed card and then you reveal the card after reading their mind (Yeh! Sure!).

Anyway, I was performing the effect for the husband and I was in a quandry because I felt the selected card could be either a red card or a black card.


I asked the husband to concentrate on his selected acrd, and, thinking quickly, I put one of the choices on the top of the deck and one on the bottom of the deck and I was prepared to use an "Equivox" out.

I asked the husband to name his card, he asid "King of Hearts" and I casually turned over the top card of the deck AND BLEW HIM AWAY.

I then started to put the cards away and his wife said: "Wait a minute. You didn't name my card"!!

Well, you know where this is going... I continued putting the deck away What would have been the point of doing anything else? I either knew her card or I didn't. So, I calmly finished putting away the deck, asked her to concentrate on her card and I (after a lot of straining and scrunching up my face, etc.) named the black card I had placed on the bottom of the deck.

Well, she literally SCREAMED and started shaking and saying: "I don't believe it! I don't believe it!".

Even tho I was new to magic, I had the good sense to know that nothing else I could do that day could possibly top that last effect. So I plead exhaustion from the last effect, I aplogized and quit for the day. The couple left our house about 2 hours later still muttering to themselves.

Turk

P.S. Does anyone know the originator of this effect and the name of the original effect? I'd love to know. Thanks.

This one happened when I was working in law enforcement, just a few short years ago.

It was probably around 2 in the afternoon, mid-summer. I was dispatched to assist in finding a young boy who had strayed away from his mother. Upon arrival, I was informed by the childs mother that her son suffered a disorder, and was very "skiddish" around people...especially authority figures. As I walked around the area, I finally spotted the child hiding behind some bushes next to a bowling alley. Not wanting to scare the child, I immediately pretended to not see him, and sat down on a curb only a few feet away from him. I reached into my extra little pouch and pulled out a little red sponge ball. I immediately "hung" it in mid air, invisibly, much like David Roth's Hanging Coins, and then went on to remove the next little red sponge ball. Of course, I knew I had his attention, and could just imagine what his face must have looked like as that ball just seemed to disappear and remain suspended somewhere else. I repeated the little fake transfers twice more and began to hear rustling in the bushes. A short time later, and a much bigger smile than I ever expected, mother and son were re-united with tears in mom's eyes. In addition, I had a new little fan for life.

A few days later, I received an award from my superiors for going above and beyond. This mom had sent letters to every superior who existed at the time. To this day, the letter sits framed in my hallway as a rememberance of how such a simple little trick can have an impact on someones life.

Just my perfect little magic story.

I was doing the healed and sealed at a friends party one night and it had all went well. I also pulled of some other card effects and genuinely entertained people. Later in the evening the host said all the beers were gone. I noticed a full tin sitting amoung some empty ones so I picked it up and gave it to him. It floored him he actually thought I created a full tin of beer from amoung the empty ones and the crazy thing was I wasn't doing magic - I hadn't even spotted the oportunity to make it into something, but everyone else thought I had done something astounding!

I was working at a private party and I was about to start my show.Got my props on stage and connected sound system, when I noticed some uneven chairs in the back of the room.I walked to the back to take care of this then suddently,a a kid walked into the room and sat in the first row without noticing my presence in the room.

I started to check my wireless microphone by saying:Hello.Good afternoon..

I heard the kid said:Hi,Who are you?

I said:I am Mago Mai.

He said:Shure...If you are Mago Mai why can't I see you now?

I Said : Because I am invisible.

Kid said:If you are a magician why don't you appear?

I loved to hear those words,I started to carefully walk towards the kid.Right before I got to close to him I asked: Do you really want me to appear?

I turned off my microphone and sat behind the kid.

When he was saying that he really wanted me to appear,I got real close to his ear and whispered:Hello.I am here..

You should have seen this kid's face...

His eyes were so big and his mouth wide opened.I bet you he wasn't expecting this to happen.

Every time I remember this story I smile and think how beautyfull is to perform magic for the kids.
Mago Mai

I wish these little miracles would´ve happened elsewhere (like in a show) but they happened at the office during some unusually long and dull days

I was entertaining a co-worker in her office and a few others had gathered around. I was doing very basic stuff, nothing really fancy. I had a card selected and controlled to the top. I am not sure what the effect is called but in it you toss the deck and the selected card just flips over.

When tossing the deck, I hit my elbow on her bookshelf and the deck didn´t really fly as planned...It was all over her table and one single card standing up between the keys on her computer´s keyboard. Needles to say, it was the selected card-and I had not glimpsed it so didn´t even know which card she had chosen. The look on her face did make it quite clear though...

The other bit is fun and really magical as well. I had handed the deck over for a co-worker to shuffle and then select a card (I was making this trick up as I went along, the plan was to retrieve the deck and then get the card). She was taking a lot of care and when she selected it, I saw a perfect reflection on the lock of her handbag right next to her. It was all show afterwards but she still reminds people how I knew her card without ever touching the deck.

Brenda Q and I were performing a sealed prediction effect. The prediction related to details spontaneously submitted by audience members during the performance and just prior to having the prediction opened and read. We had spiced up the text of the prediction with facts collected through pre-show work from a handful of audience members.

During the course of the evening, one of the spectators who had unwittingly contributed to our effect received a call from home and immediately left. The woman in question hated the color neon orange but loved the color mauve. Our prediction was already prepared with this statement: “There was a young woman in pink who insisted that her favorite color was mauve … not neon orange.”

In performance, I had little choice but to approached another woman and asked her about color. As none of the other ladies were dressed primarily in pink I reserved myself to the old adage, “a mistake or two makes mentalism more real” and approached a woman in a nice business suit.

I asked her to name a color. Any color but her favorite. She responded, “Orange”.

I replied, “Really? Orange is not your favorite?”

She said, “No.”

I probed further, “How do you feel about neon orange?”

“Oh, I can’t stand it.”

“So you’re saying you don’t like neon orange?” She shook her head.

I asked, “What would you say your favorite color is?”

It was too much to ask for but she said, “Mauve”.

The audience reaction to the validity of each statement grew as designed. When the section about the woman in pink was read, the lady I had approached nearly fell off her chair. She blushed a deep red, held her hands to her face and peered up at me from between her fingers. After the performance, she shyly approached my wife and asked her how I knew the color of her underwear!