Taken from magic cafe..For your thought.
A couple weeks ago, I was walking downtown, and as always, there were a number of beggars, transients, bums (whatever you want to call them)shmoozing for money. Some sat against a wall with a dirty cardboard sign reading "HUNGRY, HOMELESS, PLEASE HELP" or something to that effect, while others were walking around breifly following people long enought to hit them up with one sob-story or another. (BTW my personal policy is that I give money to the ones who are either very old, or wheelchair-bound, or otherwise obviously disabled. If the person can walk & speak english...he can get a job!) Well, on this night I encountered a beggar who had the following angle. He had a deck of cards....no box, cards were absolutely FILTHY & warped / frayed, but he was challenging passersby with card tricks. He did a simple obvious (to a magician) trick, and I gave him a buck, then I watched for awhile, and he was sucsessful with a number of others, and occasionaly had a small crowd around him. This got me thinking...
I put off shaving for 3 days, donned a ragged dirty shirt & jeans, some old ripped apart sneakers I'd been meaning to throw out, a dirty ball cap (worn backwards)and armed myself with: the time machine watch, Kevin james' floating rose (enough flash paper & roses for 12 routines), rinkey-dinkey, a marked deck (DeKram) with a fine-print surprise card (AKA 'Anywhere card') A stealth pen, an eclipse tt, the D'Lites(color-changing) and I had 3 pre-rigged healed&sealed cans laying on the ground or in a nearby trashcan. I picked a place on the East-side, sat slumped against a building, and my dirty cardboard sign read thusly:
HUNGRY PLEASE HELP
IF YOU HELP....I'LL SHOW YOU MAGIC!
IF YOURE REALLY KIND...I MIGHT MAKE A ROSE FOR YOUR GIRLFREIND!
Just so you know, the sign was NOT a lie....nowhere in it did I claim to be poor / homeless, and I'm ALWAYS hungry! : ) Anyhoo, it was almost FREAKY how well this went over! People stopped because they were curious, then stayed because they were amazed & delightedly surprised to see a beggar do such things! When one guy dropped a fin & asked for the rose....I folded the paper, whereupon he sneered & said "That's not magic!" Then I made the rose float, and pulled off the transformation, and said "No...THAT was the magic!" The guy was blown away, and the lady was charmed! Whenever I got enough of a crowd, I did the healed&sealed, and they were floored! When I did the pen-thru bill trick, 9/10 times they said "keep the bill!" Within 2 hours, I'd made over 88 dollars! The next day, I came better prepared with more cans, roses, Aaaand...i made an arrangment with the owner of a convenience store, and I added the card-thru-window to my routine....2 hours yeiled 107 dollars!!!
I'll admit I DID feel a bit guilty about giving people the idea that I was homeless (although at no time did I claim to be so)but this guilt became crystalized when a woman with 2 children returned about an hour & a half after I did the D'lites for them. She pulled up on the curb, came over and gave me a plastic covered tray of little sandwiches (apparently left over from whatever meeting she'd just come from). Somehow, this really made me feel like a crumb. I changed clothes, and walked around the rest of the night, giving fives to beggars, buying people hot dogs, or balloons, and I made a 50$ donation at the shelter. I've been mulling over the right / wrong of all this, debating whether or not to try it again next weekend, but just so you know, the 'poor wandering hobo magician' angle really works!
SO ANYBODY DARES TO DO IT HERE IN SINGAPORE? & VIDEO IT
Lolx.. See how you "magically" disappear when the blue clothe guys come by...
yeah, authorities here are definitely not as.. liberal.
at a coffeeshop near my place, there is this 'regular' auntie, who goes around in her walker with this big plastic bag of tissue paper. and it just so happened that one day, a couple of men-in-blue came along and simply took her to one side, where they had a hell of a time trying to understand what she was saying in probably Hakka, or some other chinese dialect. eventually they took her into their car (but I've seen her at the coffeeshop quite a number of times since).
enough of the sod story. I do agree with defile, in that begging in Singapore is quite hopeless. I could raise a few more examples, but I gotta go sleep.
now thats real cool.. haha..