FIFO Halloween party, with magic show

A friend of mine said that: "We are all going to a Halloween party. We are all going as zombies! We even bought latex for make-up effects. And I bought a Halloween costume that has a skirt that is so short I was super surprised. Also, there will be a foreigner doing a magic show at the party." The event was also located about two minutes by foot from my apartment.

Actually, she mainly wanted to ask me what kind of paint I had used last year and other make-up related questions, but with all that information... A party with a magic show. A foreigner who does magic. People going like zombies. In my back yard. There were just too many factors telling me the Japanese gods wanted me to go to that party, so I asked to have some time off from the magic bar and spent the early hours in a FIFO party.

Me and a Korean Facebook friend.

FIFO here is not what I first think of when I see the abbreviation (which is a queue, similar to LIFO, a stack) but it stands for "Furtherment of International Friendship Organization". So there were quite a lot of foreigners there, and a lot of Japanese people that wanted to talk to foreigners (which is not that easy in Sapporo, since there are relatively few foreigners here).

My friends showed up looking more like zombies than I had expected, since they kept saying it was their first time and they were not very good etc.

My friends showed up an hour or so later than I did. I also ran into a Korean girl I know a little (we are Facebook friends, and we have met at some hanami (cherry blossom viewing) party and some Hokkaido University event). The magician also turned out to be someone I have met. Five years or so ago I met a guy called Johnny Samoa (from New Zealand) at a hanami event, and since I had just started practicing magic at that time he mentioned that he too does magic and we talked a bit about magic. We have not met since then, but he was the magician at this FIFO party, and he still remembered me.

Johnny Samoa

The magic show was fairly short, but had some interesting magic. First there was the "kiss trick" currently quite popular on YouTube. A spectator selects a card and signs it. It is folded and the spectator keeps this card in her mouth. The magician then takes another card and signs that. This is folded and put in the magician's mouth. When the magician and the spectator exchange a kiss, the cards also change places. This is a nice trick, and I saw it performed in a magic bar in Fukuoka too (there, two spectators who came to the bar together kissed and exchanged cards they had in their mouths).

Then he had another spectator pick and sign another card. This card disappeared from the deck after having been returned there. The spectator then took out a key-ring from a paper bag that had been standing on a table since before the show started. The key-ring had a plastic thing with what seemed to be a folded card inside the (un-openable) plastic. The magician by some magic made the card inside the plastic block disappear (or come out) and now held a folded card in his hand that turned out to be the spectators signed card.

Then the magician had five spectators come up, and gave them each a card from the royal straight flush in spades. After explaining what a royal flush is, he returned the five cards to the deck and shuffled the cards. After some shuffling and flourishes, he produced the five cards in different ways again.

Finally, he did some "card from thin air" productions ("million cards"). The Japanese girls standing next to me seemed to have some trouble in understanding what magic was being done, so maybe he should have explained the goal of the tricks in Japanese too (he spoke mainly English), though I had no problems following what he wanted to show.

I met and spoke to quite a few interesting people, and I saw many nice costumes. All in all, a quite nice Halloween party.

Dragon Ball

A playing card! If you look closely, you can see that my outfit is actually a zombie magician, and I have a white zombie dove in my pocked (one in each pocket, though only one is visible in the photo).

The Joker. A popular outfit this year.

Other zombies!

Cute Snowwhite and Cute Witch (?)

Spiderman, unmasked!

Office worker Batman, with a Bat-tie.

Everyone goes like a zombie

Zombie selfie after finishing putting on the make-up.

A friend of mine said that: "We are all going to a Halloween party. We are all going as zombies! We even bought latex for make-up effects. And I bought a Halloween costume that has a skirt that is so short I was super surprised. Also, there will be a foreigner doing a magic show at the party." The event was also located about two minutes by foot from my apartment.

Zombie selfie 7 hours later, in the shabby toilet of a club.

Everyone keeps telling me that while the zombie look is good, I should do something different. I wanted to do something different this year, but since everyone else was going like zombies, for the first day I also did my old zombie routine. I tried to make my hair white by using chalk this year (to have something new), but it did not change very much.

After receiving a glowing bracelet and putting it inside the blood stained shirt.

I took some time off from the magic bar and went to a party early in the evening (the one my friends were going to). Then I went to our magic bar, performed magic for three groups of customers, and then it seemed to be more or less over for the night, so I left again. I went to another Halloween party (where I found my friends again, and some other people I know). I also had time to drop by Bottom Cafe on my way home, where they have seen my zombie face before.

Zombie selfie 12 hours later, at home.

While walking around in Sapporo to get from one place to another, lots of people stared at me. One bouncer for some (presumably) prostitution place said: "Ah, same as last year" to his colleague when I passed.

I ran into one of our magic bar regular customers and walked up to him and said hello. He was very very surprised, as were the people he was with who wondered how he came to know someone looking like me.

I also noticed another of our regulars when I was standing in line outside the club with the huge Halloween party I went to late at night. I said "Hi" and he took a picture of me. He keeps running into me when I look weird and then puts pictures of me on Facebook. This time it was a zombie, another time I wore a shirt saying: "In some sense, a GOD" in Japanese, so he took a picture of me in the middle of a department store.

I also ended up waiting at a red light together with a  woman who was also covered in blood. We talked a bit about that, and she then asked if I was a magician. She turned out to be another performer at a Bondage/S&M event where I am supposed to do magic next month. A surprising coincidence.

Halloween related experiments

Today I tried painting scales without having to paint each individual scale (which I do not have the time or patience to do). Cutting up stockings and washing machine nets seems to produce reasonable results with very little effort.

Buying weird shit (literally!)

Today I was out looking for some things I want to use for Halloween. I found a lot of weird stuff that I was not looking for, but decided to buy anyway. One thing was: "sticky poo", which was sold in a 100 yen shop (all items are 105 yen each).

I bought two, one to check out for myself, and one for a friend who for some weird reason loves shit shaped toys... Though probably she already has one of these.

The toy is brown, shaped like poo, and you can squeeze it in your hands to make it change shape temporarily. They also sold egg shaped toys made using the same techniques, and I bought two eggs too.

Japanese post cards

I bought a box of Japanese post cards. It is a series of 15 paintings depicting different steps of the traditional Japanese tea ceremony. Yesterday, the tea ceremony club at our university were all dressed up in very cute kimonos and were giving out sweets and tea to anyone that passed by. I wanted to go there, but our professor had scheduled activities for use during most of this week, so we did not have time (it takes about 15 minutes to go through a quick version of the tea ceremony) to participate.

Extreme Ping-Pong in Sweden

I recently found some funny clips on YouTube with the Tumba Ping Pong Show, which seems to be a Swedish group performing "extreme ping-pong". They are really funny, and the videos are well made (good looking special effects). They also have the Tumba Ping Pong Show Web site. Their YouTube videos are highly recommended! :-)

Sweden actually used to be very strong in "normal" ping-pong, and managed to take lots of medals in various sport events. Nowadays I do not think there are any world class players, but Asian people still talk to me about Jan-Ove Waldner. Another strong player was Jörgen Persson.

Magic Mania Meeting at Red King

Yesterday we had a "magic mania" meeting at the magic bar "Red King" where one of my friends now work. It was the first time in many months, and quite a lot of fun. I wrote more about the magic mania meeting on my magic blog.