Last night, we watched a movie about illusion called The Mysteries of Magic, The Impossible Made Possible. It featured the history of illusion, especially as it related to people producing ghosts and conjuring up "spirits." It was very enlightening to see how far people would go to make a person believe something.
One of the illusions involved reflections in glass. It was an illusion called "Pepper's Ghost," where people would enter this old house, received all sorts of sensory deprivation, drink "poison" (which was actually some type of narcotic to make them more open to the trick), and then be lead to the edge of death where they would see a beautiful girl turn into a skeleton, right before their eyes.
After the video was over, Bohemian jumped up and said, "We can do one of those! We can do one of those magic tricks!" So he sent all of the kids from the room, except for Bard, and then he arranged us thus: Bard sat on a stool on one side of the room, just behind the french door. I sat on the other side of the room on a stool where I couldn't be seen but facing the french door. The room was completely dark, and we each held a flashlight. When both of our flashlights were on, Bard could be seen through the french door's window, and my reflection could be seen ON the window. Thus, we could line up our faces so that we would be in exactly the same place. Then, Bard turned her flashligh on and I turned mine off. When Bohemian would count "three," Bard would turn her flashlight off, and I would turn mine on. Her image would then disappear, and mine would appear exactly where she had been!
We called the other three kids down and showed them the illusion. They were amazed! It was as if Bard were disappearing and I were appearing in her place! The other kids had great fun with it, Monet figuring the mechanics of the trick out right away and putting it to other uses. He was able to make himself disappear and immediately started talking about all of the possibilities for the trick. Bohemian explained that it was through a trick like this that David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear.
This magic moment went right along with our discussion on light and darkness, in more ways than one!
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