Here’s a video that’s kinda fun if you know what’s going on:
Maybe I should explain what’s going on.
Penn & Teller do a regular magic show in Las Vegas, several times a week, and have been doing so for years now. The show changes constantly, with some tricks being retired once they’ve had their time, and new ones being introduced. About a year ago, they started doing a trick where Teller escapes from a bag of helium.
At one point in the trick, for reasons perhaps best known to himself, Penn takes a photograph of the audience. The above video is a collage of all the photos of every Vegas audience they’ve played to, for the twelve months they’ve been doing this trick.
I saw this a couple of weeks ago, I think because Penn posted a link to it on Twitter. Like just about everyone in the comments thread, I wondered if I’d be able to see myself in there. I’ve never been to Vegas, but I saw P&T at the Hammersmith Apollo when they were briefly in London last October, and I’d seen it happen there. I watched the video, looking out for a different theatre appearing at some point near the beginning of the run.
After a little while, though, I thought to myself… Wait… Did I see them do the helium bag thing at the Hammersmith show?
I was definitely at one of their recent live shows at the Apollo. I’ve definitely heard Penn talk about the helium trick a lot, and I’ve definitely seen it on TV… but am I sure I’m not conflating these different events and remembering something which didn’t actually happen?
Going solely by my memory, I genuinely can’t tell.
At first glance, the memory of seeing the trick happen live, in a theatre, right in front of me, appears to reside in my brain. But I don’t feel like I can extrapolate from that to say that it definitely happened.
One thing I can do, though, is to check some other sources, and measure those against what I seem to remember, to see how plausible it is. A quick check of this very blog finds me reporting on seeing the show last July, not October, so already I’m getting things wrong. And if it was July when I saw them, then surely that was before they’d finished working on the trick and had ever performed it publicly.
Furthermore, their Wikipedia page states:
The duo had hoped to put the trick in their mini-tour in London; however, it was first shown to the public in their Las Vegas show on 18 August 2010.
If that doesn’t count as proof positive that my brain is screwy, I don’t know what does. Your memory of what happened is just one piece of data among many when trying to determine the truth.
