Silent Mora and the Double Sucker Coin Vanish

Ring 122 of the International Brotherhood of Magicians in Boston is known as the Silent Mora Ring after an old timer named, you guessed it, Silent Mora. Although I was not around to see that prestidigitator's performances, I heard that one of his most striking impromptu moves was at a restaurant where, apparently leaving a nice tip for the waiter or waitress, he would pull up a piece of table cloth and introduce a large coin, a half dollar or silver dollar, into the fold of cloth. Of course, before the the hapless waiter could collect, it vanished, like money found in a dream. All Mora did was a retention pass of some sort, using the tablecloth instead of the hand. Experimenting with these principles, I came up with a different angle. Standing with his right side toward the audience, the performer displays a half dollar in a production grip (pinched at the tips of the forefinger and thumb) in the right hand. Showing his left hand completely empty, he then puts the coin not so much in the hand as between the left thumb and forefinger, seeming to shove it home. The activity mimicked is to obviously place a coin in the a left reverse thumb palm. Because many amateurs know that you can hide coins by clipping them behind your fingers, the audience thinks it has "figured it out"--you are putting the coin behind, not in, your hand. I do this with two coins. After apparently inserting the first one, as stated, between in the back of the left thumb crotch--but secretly spinning it via the "whirl" vanish to the right fingertips--I pretend to crumble-vanish it. I open all my fingers but keep my thumb clipped so that it looks like I am hiding the coin. Of course you should act a little suspicious to enhance the illusion. Then what I do is open and close my left hand while moving my left thumb still more suspiciously back and forth in a hokey, rhythmic movement--the motions are based on the old transfer of backpalmed playing card to the front in the (closing and opening) and displaying of both sides of the hand. In other words, just make it look like you are somehow showing both sides of your hand without them glimpsing the back (and then front) thumb palmed coin. Meanwhile in the right hand....the coin goes not into a normal palm, but into an oblique Downs angle palm. The reason this is done is so that, when you repeat the procedure, pretending to (which would be extremely difficult) put a second coin behind the left thumb, you can slide this second coin, which as also been stolen in the act of pretending to put it behind the thumb, and smoothly add it to the underside of the first obliquely palmed coin. Any noise from the addition of the second coin sliding from the right fingertips to join its comrade will be attributed by spectators to the addition of the second coin to the back left thumb palm. Then you repeat the bit of business simulating a reversal of the thumb palm. For the trick's denoument, you look at the spectators, as if suddenly realizing they are suspicious, and slowly open both your left hand all the way, showing both sides. Then, eyes darting, you can pretend to locate the missing coins and produce them. I usually pluck one out of the cloth of my shirt, and produce the other from beneath a jacket or under a lapel.