An egg—and by an egg, I just mean a hen’s egg, the only kind most people I know have ever seen—looks kind of magic just sitting there, a mysterious, lopsided moon of a beast.

Once snatched from its mother, if it somehow ducks being breakfast, it waits for its blankness to be painted, dyed, and/or graffitied, so that a Magic Rabbit can hide it for human kids to find and play with (could that story be weirder?). Both a popular folk rhyme^ and a Timeless Children’s Classic testify to the egg’s whimsical and wildly breakable nature. Like in the old riddle (which is really about a nut), the inside of each egg is a place that no human eye has ever seen before, so if some small, long-gone thing can reappear there, well, that can be amazing, since its very nature seems to defy all but superhuman tinkering. And in the eyes of a child, when a raw egg suddenly has “a great fall,” it can be like a cool little cartoon kind of jumps from nowhere by surprise, happily splashing real goo. Is it any wonder that most kids like such a highly-mythologized-yet-everywhere object as that?

"It's like they're suddenly seeing a friend show up, somebody they feel like they already know and like."

I’m doing a series of magic shows for kids at some Kansas libraries this summer. Luckily for me, at least from a crowd control point of view, most kids under twelve don’t travel far alone, so there are also some parents, grandparents, library staff, and lonely humans of all kinds,  there. Performing for such a mixed audience of kids is kind of like performing for a crowd of happy drunks, since as many have noticed, kids in different age ranges have their own distinctive ways of behaving in public, some of which they share with booze-addled adults, at least when it comes to watching magic tricks.

The crowds have been bigger than I’d guessed they’d be and might actually make it into the thousands before the summer ends, based on the numbers where I’ve already been, which would be nothing at all to a big-name performer but is somewhat astonishing to me.

I’ve done magic shows for decades, but before now, I’ve always tried to skip kids shows as much as I could, since I didn’t like the kinds of tricks that I thought were the only kind kids really liked–noisy, prefab feats straight from magic store shelves, featuring all kinds of big stupid props, usually capped with the woozy appearance of a woozier white rabbit. Kids often do like such tricks, at least in the right hands, and they almost always like rabbits, just about no matter what, so if you’re up for all the amazing nonsense that goes into making such critters materialize, you can’t go too far wrong. But I’m learning that, if presented in the right way, kids can like sleight of hand tricks a lot, too, and that’s the wonderful luck that I’m starting to build on now.

David Kaye, aka Silly Billy

Despite the common wisdom among many kids’ show magicicans that what matters most when doing magic for kids is that you have a jillion wacky comic bits built into the show, not how magical the actual tricks are—it’s how much fun you can scare up getting there, not where you actually go, or so that story goes—what the kids I’ve been meeting want most from me is something that they’re surprised to see for at least that (please snap your fingers here) long. They do like to laugh, of course, so humor is important to just about any show for kids. But all kinds of things in life are funny to them all the time, and most kids do a lot of laughing, anyway. What they really want from magicians, almost uniquely, though, whether a given trickster is funny or not, is happy flashes of weirdness, at once cartoon-like and real, during which the facts of the world, at least for awhile, don’t win. (Now that I think about it, that’s what most adults who like magic tricks want, too). And the wildly strong desire that maybe 90% of kids at  a magic show have to get up onstage and play a hands-on part in the tricks they see is often linked, I believe, to wanting a close-quarters, eye-witness stripe of proof that the exciting possibilities that seem to jump from what they’re seeing are maybe for real, not just odd optical illusions, spun from distance and tricks of the light.

So as much as I plan to continue learning to integrate all the varied elements that nearly ninety years of secular children’s magic have shown to make kids like tricks more, especially as distilled in David Kaye’s (Silly Billy’s) Seriously Silly, I simultaneously want to be slowly morphing the tricks I do until, unlike the case with most kids shows, virtually nobody watching, even most magicians (should there ever happen to be any there) will be able to decipher how the tricks are done. Believe it or not, no matter what trick you might have floating in your head as a perfect example of just how stupid magic tricks can be, there are magicians out there somewhere right now who can do whatever idiot old thing you’re thinking of in a way that would astonish you. Most people imagine there to be a one-to-one correspondence between tricks and the ways that they’re done. But most tricks can, in fact, be done in God’s plenty of ways, ranging from the silly to the sublime–even though most magicians, for all kinds of reasons, never get nearly as far from the silly as they could.

Enter the egg. I’ve been thinking for many moons about how to use eggs in magic tricks. But sadly, with the streak o’ shows I’ve been hired to do slightly more than half over, I’m still toying with what parts eggs can/can’t

play, so they’ll likely have to wait until another season to make it into the show.  When kids see a trick involving a “real-life prop,” like eggs, or lemons–or a giant real potato with two faded old, sky blue, Mr Potato Head eyes stuck in it, like the one that appears in my shows–it’s like they’re suddenly seeing a friend show up, somebody they feel like they already know and like, since even the potato’s toy eyes, like a fake moustache on your mom, fool nobody.

Dariel Fitzkee

But when an egg makes an offbeat appearance, unlike most other fruits and vegetables, which you can just let kids briefly handle onstage to prove that they’re for real, there is an added complication, since just about the only way that plays from the stage to prove that an egg is really an egg is to break it into a clear glass, and the second you do that, Elvis instantly leaves the building, since with very few exceptions, what’s left of the egg after its broken, as effective a climax as that act makes to many tricks, is pretty sleight-of-hand proof. So routining even a quick series of egg tricks is far trickier than it may at first appear, since the ultimate power of many of them relies on the same piece of one-time-only “ocular proof,” to steal Othello’s famous phrase.

Kids, tricks. Mediations on ownership of same.

So I’ve been reading all I can about egg tricks, and of the many I’ve stumbled upon, the three sources I like the best, just in case you’d like to play the home version of our game, are these: Eggstraordinary Ways of Exhibiting With Eggs, by Joseph Ovette (1932), The Strange Inventions of Dr Ervin, by Dariel Fitzkee (1937), and The Encyclopedia of Egg Magic, by Donato Colucci (2002).  In those three books, alone, are dozens of fascinating oosporic conjurations, stretching from the likes of The Chameleon Egg (Ovette), to Egg and Lemon (Fitzkee), to The Confetti Egg and The Spooky Egg (both in Colucci).

So since you just keep asking, based on those sources and other scattered writings, here’s roughly what I’d ultimately like to do with an egg, at least as I type this. In the 1960s and maybe before, Davenport’s Magic in London sold a version of the torn and restored paper (you know, the trick where something is ripped up, then somehow unripped again) that revolved around the Humpty Dumpty story. As luck would have it, I recently tracked down a copy of that trick being sold by a retiring British magician, as well as, in another source, a version of that routine that climaxes with the startling production of a real egg from the restored picture. The egg that appears is decorated to match the Humpty Dumpty picture used in the ripped-poof!-unripped trick just mentioned, so the original description has you use a boiled egg, which you then give to the child who helped you with the trick, ostensibly for him/her to eat.

Since that move feels a little law suit-happy to me, circa 2009, I’d rather produce a raw egg, scribbled up to look like Humpty, instead (which will be riskier and require a new method), find a way to apparently float him around a little and maybe bounce him off the stage without harming him (which there really are convincing ways to do), only to finally crack him open and discover one of two signed dollar bills, borrowed and vanished at the start of the show, inside, with the other popping up in a lemon that otherwise magically appears (the lemon part happens now in the show that I already do).  Max Malini, a wildly successful 19th-20th century Polish magician, who performed very successfully for numerous members of international royalty and other global elites, among innumerable others, used to vanish two bills and reproduce them from an egg and a lemon, respectively, so what I’d like to do would be a skewed kind of tribute to that idea. Cracking open Humpty  to get the borrowed bill would also provide the delayed proof that the white thing I’d been fooling with for a minute or two was, in fact, a real egg. But finding a way to quickly “uncrack” Humpty after the trick would likely be necessary as a quick coda, if, as I suspect it would, his crack up for the cause made some younger watchers sad. So that, to make a long story short (and as the old joke goes, I know it’s way too late for that) is the magic I’d like to do with an egg.

So when I hear the word “egg” these days, some streak from the jumble above is what usually tumbles through my head. Once upon a time, I guess it was otherwise. Aren’t you glad to be out of that loop? Glad that, as the silly ad never stops telling us, tricks are really for kids–not for those who, like the rabbit, are just too silly to quit?

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Mr. Potato Head: faeryboots

Trix: jbcurio