By Adrian Dale
Abracadabra! Watch me pull a rabbit out of a hat! I’ll now escape from a straightjacket! These are some of the many stereotypes of magicians. But magic isn’t all flashy illusions and impending doom. A lot of magic is about sleight of hand. One practitioner of sleight-of-hand magic is Kai Yamanishi.
Yamanishi, a sophomore at Mount Vernon High School, has been practicing magic for a little over three years, since the summer of 2015. He’s taught himself through the usage of the internet and “lots and lots of books.”
Yamanishi began practicing magic after one of his good friends got involved in it. “I thought magic was cool and it seemed like fun. I also had a friend who did magic at the time and that got me started,” said Yamanishi.
He hasn’t had the opportunity to perform publicly but would like to. “I’ve never really had a problem with being on stage,” said Yamanishi. “I started doing musicals and plays at a very young age, and it’s almost a lifestyle at this point.”
Yamanishi is a natural showman, and he enjoys performing for others. He likes magic because of people’s reaction to tricks. “There are two reactions you’ll usually get: either ‘do it again’ or ‘Wait. How?’”
Yamanishi’s best trick is a card trick known as Out of This World. “You shuffle up a deck of cards. You give it to a participant and have them deal them into piles of red and black without looking. You have them switch the pile they’re dealing to halfway through. When you turn the piles over, they’re red and black,” he explained. This is a great trick, and gives you a little shock, even though you may have figured out what was coming. Yamanishi requested that the way the trick works is not revealed, but it is a remarkably simple yet effective trick.
Many card tricks use similarly simple techniques. “What really makes a trick is the patter, the story around the trick, keeping the audience engaged. The sleight itself takes maybe 10 seconds. Most of the time is taken up by keeping the audience entertained.”
Yamanishi’s favorite trick, however, doesn’t actually involve cards. It’s actually a coin trick, where he disappears a coin and makes it re-appear in someone’s pocket. “It’s an easy trick to do,” said Yamanishi, “but the audience’s reaction is great.”
One trick that was particularly interesting was a trick where Yamanishi made a card reappear on top of the deck. It’s extremely simple, but when done right, almost imperceptible. He lifts two cards from the deck at the same time, which he says is the most difficult part of the trick, as you can not let the audience see that you’re picking up two cards and not just one. He shows the first of the two cards to the audience, puts the cards back on top of the deck, and then pulls the first card off. If done correctly, the audience can not tell that it’s a different card than he showed them. He put the card he lifted back into the deck randomly, does some flashy move, and the card “magically” re-appears back on top of the deck, while in reality, it never moved.
Yamanishi’s favorite memory of performing magic was the time he supposedly used the force. “A small child was really into Star Wars. I’d been playing around with invisible thread, and he saw me doing card tricks. I decided to convince him that I could use the force. I used the invisible thread to fly some cards around and ‘levitate’ some things. I managed to convince him I had the force, and through sleight of hand, I made it so he could levitate things. For about a year and a half afterwards, every time this kid saw me, he insisted that I showed him the force, but I didn’t because I don’t just carry invisible thread around with me.”
Yamanishi’s family has been supportive of his magic. “One year, almost all of the gifts I got for Christmas were related to magic. They’ve bought me lots of books and other supplies.” It isn’t every family lucky enough to have a magician in it, after all. And he would like everybody to know — he will do birthday parties.
