Hold a coin at the tips of your fingers in one of your hands.

Bring your other hand over to grab the coin.

Before your hand grabs the coin, release the coin from the tips of your fingers and let it fall into the base of your fingers.




Continue with the motion of the “grabbing” hand and act as if you have actually taken the coin with it. In reality, the coin remains in the original hand.


Take the hand away as if it holds the coin. From this point, you can blow on the empty hand and seemingly make the coin disappear-just open your hand. And then you can make the coin reappear by reaching into your pocket with your coin-laden hand and “pulling” out the coin.

Effect: In this trick, you cause a toothpick that you're holding in your hand to vanish in a flash. At the end, you're holding your fingers wide apart.


Using your thumb, push the bottom end of the toothpick between your middle and ring fingers and into the finger ring.

This view from the back shows how your thumb feeds the toothpick into the finger ring.


With the entire tooth pick pushed through and behind your hand, briefly hold your thumb over the divide between your middle and ring finger. At this stage, make sure that the toothpick is completely behind your hand and securely held by the finger ring.

Open your hand and keep your fingers together.


Open your fingers so they are wide apart.



This shows the location of the toothpick behind your hand that your audience doesn't see.

Craig is a Chicago native who began his performing career when just a child, appearing in television and radio commercials. The magic bug hit early but he didn't start performing till his teens where he was soon co-hosting a weekly local television show featuring Chicago magicians. He quickly rose the ranks performing in clubs and industrial shows. Always innovating new approaches to magic, he could adapt to different types of performing conditions and audiences. This adaptibility made him a popular choice to open for touring celebrities. From Alice Cooper to the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, his style and personality won them over He became the first illusionist to appear at an outside arena rock extravaganza with his performance before 30,000 at Comiskey Park..


Later, he created and toured with the "Magic with the Symphony" concept where he performed as a guest artist with symphony orchestras performing his effects to the classical fare played behind him. Along the way, he created and built many of his own illusions. Soon fellow magicians sought him out to create and build for them as well. His creativity and ingenuity brought him to the attention of the top trade show producers who hired him to create magic built around a products assets or a companies pitch..

He re-located to southern California and there in the sunny climate of the entertainment capitol of the world his creativity and industry reputation really took off. He became the go-to guy for the magician looking for that signature, original illusion. Because of his clever engineering ability and workmanship, top illusion designers Jim Steinmeyer and Don Wayne often call on him to build the prototypes and production models of their latest creations..

Television and movie producers have called upon him to create and build effects and to date his props have appeared in five Broadway productions as well as stages in Reno, Las Vegas, on cruise lines, amusement parks and around the world.

Credits include:

Television---
CSI
The Great Magic of Las Vegas (also shown in Europe)
NGK specials--Japan
NBC magic specials

Movies--
Boogie Nights
Effects of Magic
Bug

Broadway--
Sheri Lewis on Broadway
On the Stem
Amour
Mary Poppins
Invisible Man
Drowsy Chaperone

Magician clients include--Hans Klok, Mark Kalin, The Majestixs, John Hurakawa, Cyril Takahami, Danny Cole, Rico De La Vega, Jay Owenhouse, Scott and Muriel, Al Belmont, Eun Gyeol Lee, Tina Lenart, Chuck Jones, Silvan, Arlingtons, Rick Wilcox, Ricky Jay, Steve Dick, Mark Wilson, Luna Shemada, Dan Birch, TLC, Steve Wheeler, Rand Woodbury, Milan Forzetting, Franz Harary, John Gabriel, Mallory Lewis, David Goldrake, Jim Munroe, Dave Womach, Larry Wilson, Magic Castle, Neil Patrick Harris, Jim Steinmeyer, Universal Studios, Legoland, Mike Caveney, Curtis Adams, Mike Super, Terry Evanswood, Alexander Lien, Marshall Mcgoon, John Carney, Daniel Rosen, Nemesio Garcia, Randy Pryor, Carrie Campbell, Chipper Lowell, John Blum, Russel Lewis, Nicholas Night.

There are few writers who have been able to transcend the labels of prose, poetry and storytelling to create a synthesized artform unique to the literary world. Three come to mind: Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs and Rich Ferguson.

The commonalities run deep not surface or perfunctory; the tracking of the seedy human minutiae of existence, the private hell of the greasy pop proletarian, the blurring of the paradoxes of benevolent versus malevolent and the sacred versus the profane, all the while using an interdimensional language bridging the chasm of star-crossed lovers and dysfunctional shysters. Rich Ferguson conveys the pimply win/lose truth of Buk in the high-minded junkie Burroughs way of expressing.

Wailing from New Jersey, bombing San Francisco in the late 80s and then emerging on the Los Angeles ONYX Spoken Word scene in the 90s as one of the originalNeo-Beat "Idyllic Nihilists," Rich Ferguson holds the eternal soul of angels within the black leather pouch of personal demons. He willingly inhabits and recounts a world of sad violent teenagers doing donuts in muscle cars; of Mother Mary and "the ashes that are her eyes"; of strip club kidnappers; of personal sin inventories and a planet devoid of dogs; of urban decay and the fertility of modern charade; of humans treading water in a bright polluted sea.

As a spoken word performer and musician, Rich Ferguson is unparalleled, leaving Buk and Burroughs in the dust; shapeshifting, teleporting and otherworldly-agile, contorting and twisting Christ-like, crying eyes rolling back for an intense salvation, lipstick-smeared wedding dress-wearing ghoul ranting perfect sense into an otherwise clogged filter.

Rich Ferguson is a rarified artist leaving no telescoping stone unturned.
Milo Martin

Rich Ferguson is a poet with a sound, not the scratch of pencil on paper or the tick of fingertips on plastic, but the sonification of syllables warm and rubbing up against trip hop beat and street atmosphere. Imagine Kerouac kissing Massive Attack with a side order of Swordfish Trombone. All this and more can be heard on Rich’s latest CD, Where I Come From, produced by Herb Graham, Jr (John Cale) with Jeremy Toback (Brad) on bass and Butch (Eels) on drums.