Magic Photography.
This is for a small group of guests who know each other fairly well. The photographer boasts that he can take an impression of a person’s face on the back of a spoon, and make it so real that another person who has been out of the room can almost immediately tell whose picture was taken.
In the face of the scoffing, he sends someone (of course his confederate) out of the room, and sets about taking the picture of one of the guests on the back of a spoon. He rubs the spoon over the entire face, pressing into the depressions at either side of the nose and being sure to get the mold of the chin. He then calls in the one who was out of the room, shows him the spoon and asks, “What beauty is it?” At once comes the answer, “Winona Beal,” and he is right. He goes out again and when he has been called in the second time, the photographer says, showing him the spoon, “Go ahead!” and the answer is, “It is Gertrude Addams,” and again he is right.
The solution is this: The first two words of the photographer’s statement have as their first letters the initials of the one photographed. “What beauty is it?” gave the initials “W” and “B” and “Go ahead” gave “G” and “A.”
In games of this kind, instead of endeavoring to find out the trick used, there is the inevitable someone who says, “Let me go out.” It has proved wise to let one of these inevitables go out of the room, telling him when he comes back that you are not sure that he will be quick enough to get the resemblance on the spoon, thereby putting the burden of proof on him. Sure enough, he fails, and almost always your group will ask that the one who was first sent out of the room be sent again, for no trick that does not work is interesting.
It is another matter when someone thinks he has discovered your trick. Instead of telling the group what he thinks it is, you ask him to leave the room in place of your confederate and when he gets back and tells correctly whose picture is on the spoon, it is much to the delight of the crowd. As each one of them discovers the trick and is allowed to try out his discovery, one by one they guess it, and nothing puts a crowd into a better humor than to have guessed a trick which looked hard!