The magician wearing this well-traveled top hat has a few tricks up his sleeve! When you poke your hand up through the velvet hat, out pops a fluffy white bunny waving his paws and twitching his nose.

FACTS OF INTEREST:

• The poet Goethe said, "The highest problem of any art is to cause, by appearance, the illusion of higher reality." Magicians deal very directly with this artistic transformation!
  
• Conjuring, or the practice of magic tricks, is one of the oldest performing arts. An Egyptian manuscript, known as the Westcar Papyrus, details magic acts performed at the Pharaoh's court 4000 years ago.
  
• The word 'magic' is derived from the word 'magi.' The magi were originally priest-scholars of the ancient Persians. 'Magi' means 'the mighty ones.'
  
• The real secrets of magic are psychological, not mechanical. The audience is fooled because it is looking for solutions in the wrong place. This is called misdirection.
  
• The four basic effects of magic are: production (magical appearance of objects), vanishing, transposition (vanishing then producing an object in another place), and transformation (changing one object into another).
  
• The rabbit-in-the-hat trick is very difficult to perform. The rabbit is either already in the hat under a black flap, or it is secretly slipped in from a hiding place while attention is on a string of handkerchiefs being pulled from the hat.