SLEIGHTLY MENTAL

Category: Dragon
Number of Awards in Category: 9/1
What is it: A two person routine designed to entertain you. Not necessarily fool you,
but entertain you.
Recipe: One Magician. One Mentalist. Two books. Four rubberbands (only two will be
used). Several note cards. A pen. A sharpie. A pencil. ESP cards. Cotton Balls. Two
notebooks. A make believe calculator. A blindfold. A handful of change. Your dollar
bill. The illusion of choice. A good imagination. Patience. Hopefully a sense of
humor.
Experience in Field: One of us has seventeen years of experience performing,
including being asked to perform for a national museum exhibit that traveled across
the country. One of us has been learning from that guy for a couple of months. Well
let you figure out whos who.
Why Were Doing This Awful Thing To You: Okay, lets face it, this isnt anonymous at
all. Its a performance piece. Mishkas writing this, just so you get a perspective on
this from here on out. Last year, my first student in magic and mentalism,
Desmund, approached me and told me he wanted to put together a routine for
auditioning at the Texas Renaissance Festival. I was excited to finally get a two
person act together, as well as put my skills to hard use again. I scripted and
choreographed a whole show, just for him to tell me he was moving to New York. So
I scrapped the idea, until Rook told me he was interested in learning mentalism. I
started teaching him, and he started performing about two weeks after our first
lesson. A month and a half later, we discussed the possibility of a two person act.
We started rehearsing, timing, and performing for our test audience, and found that
the performance not only worked, but was the perfect length!
Changes from the original: WellI changed the first effect, the second effect, the
third effect, the fourth effect, the sixth effectpretty much everything except for
what we call the Speakeasy, whichwell, youll see when we pull out the
blindfold. Oh, I also changed my partner from Desmund to Rook.
Inspirations: Banachek, Colin McLeod, Penn and Teller, Richard Osterlind,
Relevance: Sleight comes from Old Norse. Prestidigitation is Latin. The first
known use of magic was in Egypt in 2700 B.C. In the Middle Ages, people like us
were either highly revered or killed. In 1584, the first manuscript on sleight of hand
was published. Magics been around forever. Whatever time you perceive Amtgard
as being in, were there.

Our Goal: Our goal here is to entertain you. We know judging can be a taxing
experience, and most of you have judged a metric butt ton of competitions. We
want to change it up. Yes, chainmail is cool, there are some skilled musicians, and
some of the people who enter these categories can sew worthy of an Oscar
nomination, but when it comes down to it, youre mostly looking at inanimate
objects all day. Were here to give you a show. Enjoy it. Dont take us too seriously.