Tom Stone’s Session Notes contains strong, cleverly crafted magic that will wow the crowd and make you grin. Unsheathe the Swedish steel. Recommended.
Review by Tom Frame, in Genii magazine, June 2024
This is Tom Stone’s lecture notes from The Session convention in London, January 2024.
Within the pages of Session Notes 2024 you will find six routines for parlour and close-up:
Mittens The magician show his hands and say it is unfair to use those “weapons of deceptions” against the audience. As a handicap, the magician put on thick oven mittens before beginning a card trick. Despite the handicap, the two signed cards are found inside the mittens.
The Suss A parlour routine with post cards, based on the ‘Ship of Theseus’ paradox. A signed postcard is, bit by bit, replaced with another postcard, but the new postcard is still signed.
A Handy Gift An absurd intermission piece. The magician is handed a wrapped gift which is annoyingly difficult to open, and scissors are brought out. “Just what I needed!” the magician says after peeking into the package. “Scissors!” – and as a pair of scissors falls out of the package, the scissors in the hand disappears.
Flatworm Fry A demonstration of memory transfer. One spectator looks at a card but forgets it, while another spectator who never seen the card remembers it.
Color Deaf A small piece of silliness. Various named colors are all written down as “Grey” due to “color deafness”. But as the illness is cured, the writing changes into the named colors.
White Death Darwinism and precognition comes together in this close-up routine where the spectator tries to evade an icy cold demise.