I am a toastmaster, something I will talk about later.  A toastmaster is usually in front of 15-20 people you know. I regularly include a magic trick in my speeches and they are flawless. In fact I do them during the speech and continue like nothing happened.  But last night it was a near disaster. From hind sight I could have corrected my mistake if I had more experience. Here is the tale....

It was an entertaining after diner speech,I talked about success and the Cups and balls including some history of the C&B's. Using my RNT2 copper giants on my portable table I set up to start with a three ball vanish. with the 4th ball in the bottom cup. But when I flipped the cups for the set up I started right to left but I practice left to right. I knew something was wrong and when I finished I had zero balls on the left and 2 on the right. Had I not been flustered I would have thought to insinuate the holdout ball under the left cup and snatched up one of the balls from the right. But I just grabbed one of the right balls and put in on the left. My final loads of a lemon, apple and orange went flawlessly. next I did a two aluminum cup solid through solid that went ok but was not as smooth at the ending as I would have liked but the final loads again went well. I was back on track and  finished with a RNT2 petite chop cup routine that had the folks laughing....Time for my speech conclusion and the grand finish and grand flop...first the final load on the petite chop cup a 1 1/8 black gold ball, then two large red balls from the aluminum cups  and the fruit from the giant cups ...the apple orange and lemon rolled off the table and onto the floor....I was dejected , but it not that bad for a first public display. My wife heard clinking cups until midnight last night practice, practice, practice... CP

Thanks for sharing your experience, Gulagthebear,  I think we are (at least I do) encounter similar situations more than once. They were fun experiences for me though, with kids.

Francis

Great going… thanks for sharing your adventure in Cupping. You made the best of a peculiar situation and carried on. My worse was a table cloth sliding off a table, and launching a set of aluminum Cups with balls skyward. When retrieved 2 of the 4 balls were missing in action… it did not know how to recover… and moved on to a card trick.

Bruce

Well, I made my second attempt and it went fantastic. Remember I am giving a speech while preforming the cups.
I left my copper giants in the bag and went with RNT2 Bells of St. Mary with shining blue RNT2 1 inch balls. the three ball vanish followed by balls through the cup went fantastic this time. I loaded the cups with large red balls. After some more of the speech I moved to the RNT2 Alan aluminum chop cup. A quick routine from Paul Daniels, basically where is the ball on the top of the bottom of the cup, under the cup and in my pocket...no it's under the cup. For the grand finally  3 red balls followed by a lemon from the regular cups and a giant orange from the Alan Chop cup. My wife reports ohoos  and ahss from the crowd. The speech went well too, just 30 seconds over and a few content changes from the Toastmaster evaluation. Practice, Confidence and Patience made all the difference.  CDP

Nice..

Francis