If you like the classic Card Warp effect you will love this related but nevertheless quite different effect. And you might have seen Charlie Fry's version of this trick - Ripped & Fryed - featured on the Paul Harris True Astonishment DVDs. Now you can learn the original and get all the tips, subtleties and pointers from the creator.
Whilst you can use this effect with playing cards it works equally well with business cards. In performance you introduce the subject of the big illusions that are being performed on TV. Although you haven't brought along all your apparatus with you perhaps some young lady present would like the honor of being sawn in half right at the table top. This should get some reaction and you should be able to get a bit of byplay out of the ladies and their attitude to the possibility of being cut in two.
You eventually show two cards (ideally one is a Queen) and ask the lady to sign her name across one card with a felt tip marker. She now folds her card lengthwise, her name being inside the card, as you fold the second card along the width. Her card is placed within the folds of your card. This represents the lady being placed within the magician's box. Both ends of the spectator's card can be seen and stay in view as you tear right through both of them.
The box and the lady are clearly torn in two yet when the Lady card is taken from the box it is seen to be in one piece with the signature written across its face.
In other words, it is a disguised version of the Torn and Restored Card.
The method lends itself to a number of ways these cards can be handled allowing great flexibility to suit your own purposes, preferences and circumstances. Tearing and restoring a card is one of the strongest and most memorable effects possible with cards, because nobody in their right mind would destroy a card rendering a deck of cards useless for game play. And therefore from a psychological point of view these types of effects are some of the strongest card effects there are.
1st edition 1989; 11 pages.
word count: 2342 which is equivalent to 9 standard pages of text
