People's perception of a card guy

[jgabor]

I am doing magic for more than 2 years now and I picked up cardistry as hobby more than a year ago. I have no doubt that I'm going to keep up doing both of them for a long time.
However, I'm in a dilemma. Nowadays I do not do magic in school, only cardistry. By the way, it's good activity to keep you from getting bored. I only do magic at parties and bars but people also see me doing cardistry and that is what I'm concerned about. (They enjoy wathing it and they're always amazed even by the simplest flourishes.) My standpoint is that people either see you as a "card guy" who always plays with a pack of cards or a guy who can take any object (playing cards, for example) and do something amazing with it. For me, these 2 things are entirely separate and have nothing to with each other.
This topic will become relevant in a few months as I'll be attening a new school in a new town and I feel like I have to choose which side of me people are going to get to know.
Have you ever had this kind of a problem? If so, how did you get solved it?

P.S.: Sorry for any grammatical mistakes. I'm pretty sure I've made a few.

 

[CaseyRudd]

Hey jgabor,

This is an interesting situation, because I had almost the same experience when I was in high school. I originally did magic at school to not get bored like you mentioned. Whenever I would finish my work I would just practice at my desk to keep myself busy. I got pinned as the magic guy shortly after, being guilted into performing magic in class, etc. I got tired of it really quickly, so I switched to Cardistry instead. I would just do flourishes to keep myself preoccupied and it was something I could easily stop whenever I needed to do schoolwork. People still thought of me as the magic guy and asked me to perform tricks every now and then when I had cards but I just declined and kept doing flourishes instead. They found it pretty fascinating, as you described. From what you've said it looks like you want to keep your magic life separate from school, so I think you've answered your question already. If you want people to know right away you do Cardistry, go for it. I would keep magic outside of school because it is a bigger distraction for the class as a whole and teachers don't really like that. However, if you want people to know YOU before they know you're a card guy, I wouldn't bring the deck to school for the first week or two. Let people get to know your personality before they know what deck you are using.

-Casey

 

[baguette]

I'd recommend not to do too much magic in school. You quickly become magicman and people only care about you for your tricks and not who you really are.

 

[jgabor]

Thank you for the advices. My plan is not to let people know I'm a magician as long as possible when I get to the new school and I probably won't have a deck with me for weeks.

 

[Bryant_Tsu]

Why not doBoth? I imagine that it would be fine if you do 90% carditry with simple tricks that that involve only cards and (Basically stick to Jason England's type of card tricks). Over time you can develop carditry routines with tiny color changes or four card productions during your performace. Just a thought! (Sorry for the mistakes, the iPad keyboard is still buggy on the forums).

 

[Léo Mercier]

Hey,
I recently went to a new school and started doing card tricks.
At first it was fun but then things started to become bad, they started always wanting to shuffle the deck,to touch th card before i did a colour change,they werent there to enjoy tricks.
so i stopped

 

[Obscure123ful]

I would say cardistry. Remember to pick your audience well and if they are hecklers dont preform for them. Also always have that 1 friend that knows how the tricks are done but gives you feedback.

 

[Monarch]

You can also just use it as a cool skill that you do here and there, just not enough for people to stereotype you. If you do it for yourself, maybe people wont be so interested.