Something was wrong with my show, and I could not figure out what it was.
The tricks were good. The audience laughed in the right places. The reactions were strong. I was getting booked for corporate events in Vienna and Graz, and people seemed genuinely entertained. But when I walked offstage, I had this persistent, nagging feeling that the experience I had delivered was somehow incomplete. Like a sentence that trailed off without a period. Like a conversation that ended mid-thought because someone’s phone rang.
I could not put my finger on it. The individual pieces worked. The whole did not quite land.
I described this feeling to Adam Wilber during one of our late-night calls about Vulpine Creations. He listened patiently, the way he does when he already knows the answer but wants you to find it yourself, and then he asked a question that I have never forgotten.
“What does the end of your show have to do with the beginning?”
I thought about it. The honest answer was: nothing. My show was a sequence of strong effects, each one carefully chosen, each one individually polished, but strung together like beads on a wire rather than woven into a fabric. The first effect and the last effect had no connection. They could have been performed in any order. They could have been performed by different people. There was no thread.
That was the problem.
The Concept That Changed Everything
John Graham’s Stage By Stage articulated this principle with a clarity that made me feel both relieved and slightly embarrassed. He calls it “building bookends,” and it is the concept of starting your show and ending your show with a sense of unity that creates the sensation of harmony and underlying structure throughout your entire performance. As Stephen Covey wrote, and as Graham quotes: “Begin with the end in mind.”
The idea is deceptively simple. You begin a procedure, a theme, a joke, or an element early in your show — but you do not resolve it. You let it sit. You move on to other things. The audience registers the open loop, even if only subconsciously. Then, at the end of your show, you return to that element and close the loop. The payoff lands with a weight that it never could have achieved on its own, because it carries the accumulated momentum of everything that happened between the setup and the resolution.
This is not a new idea in storytelling. Every good novel, every satisfying film, every well-constructed speech uses some version of this technique. The opening image echoes in the closing image. The question posed in the first act gets answered in the third. The character who began the story in one state ends it in a transformed state that the audience can measure against where they started.
But somehow, in the chaos of building a magic show — worrying about methods, rehearsing technique, timing jokes, managing props — I had completely overlooked this fundamental structural principle. I was so focused on making each individual moment work that I forgot to make the whole thing feel like a unified experience.
The Anatomy of a Bookend
A bookend, at its simplest, is a two-part structure. The first half establishes something: an object, a promise, a question, a prediction, a theme, a running gag. The second half resolves it. Between the two halves, your entire show happens.
The beauty of this structure is its flexibility. The first half of the bookend does not need to be the very first thing you do. It can happen after your opening effect, once you have already established yourself and grabbed the audience’s attention. This is important because it means you can still open strong — with your best attention-grabbing material — and then introduce the bookend element once the audience is already engaged and receptive.
The first half also does not need to be dramatic or elaborate. It can be as small as mentioning an object, pointing something out, making a prediction that you set aside, or beginning a joke that you deliberately leave unfinished. The audience registers the open thread. They may not consciously think about it during the middle of your show, but when you return to it at the end, something clicks. There is a feeling of completion, of intentionality, of design.
That feeling — the sense that everything was planned, that nothing was random, that the performer had a vision for the entire experience — is enormously powerful. It is the difference between watching a collection of tricks and experiencing a show.
My First Attempt at Bookending
After reading Graham’s framework, I went back to my thirty-minute set and started looking for natural bookend opportunities. I did not want to force the structure. I did not want to add artificial connections that would feel contrived. I wanted to find the organic links that might already be hiding in my material.
I found one almost immediately, and I felt foolish for not having seen it before.
There was an element I used early in my show — something I introduced, talked about briefly, and then set aside as if it were incidental. And there was an element at the end of my show that was thematically related but that I had never connected to it. The two pieces existed in my show already. They were just not talking to each other.
I restructured so that the early element became a deliberate setup — something I introduced with just enough emphasis that the audience would register it without understanding its significance. And the late element became a payoff that called back to the beginning, closing a loop that the audience did not even know was open.
The first time I performed the revised show, at a corporate event in Linz, I felt the difference immediately. The ending had a weight, a satisfaction, that it had never had before. People applauded longer. More importantly, several audience members said some version of the same thing afterward: “That was so well put together.” Not “that was a great trick.” Not “how did you do that.” That was well put together. They were responding to the structure, to the architecture, even though they could not have identified what specifically had changed.
Beyond Tricks: Bookending Everything
Once I understood the principle, I started seeing bookend opportunities everywhere. The concept extends far beyond the tricks themselves. It applies to every element of your show.
Jokes can be bookended. You tell a joke early in the show, and it gets a laugh. Then, much later, a situation arises where you can call back to that joke — sometimes with just a word or a look — and it gets an even bigger laugh because the audience remembers the setup and feels clever for making the connection. The callback is one of the oldest tools in comedy, and it is essentially a bookend.
Themes can be bookended. If your show has a thematic throughline — something about connection, or impossibility, or the power of choices — you can introduce that theme early and return to it at the end. Not in a heavy-handed way. Not with a speech. Just with a line or a moment that echoes the beginning and gives the audience the feeling that the show was about something.
Music can be bookended. Walking on stage to a particular piece of music and then walking off to the same piece creates an instant sense of circular unity. The audience may not consciously notice the repetition, but they feel the completeness. The sound of the closing matches the sound of the opening, and the experience feels finished in a way that a random exit song cannot achieve.
Even your relationship with the audience can be bookended. If you begin the show by saying something personal, something vulnerable, something that creates a connection — and then you return to that same theme at the end, now enriched by everything that has happened in between — you create an emotional arc that transforms a magic show into a genuine shared experience.
The Discipline of Leaving Things Unresolved
Here is the part that took me the longest to learn: the first half of a bookend requires you to deliberately leave something unfinished. And that feels wrong. Every instinct tells you to complete the thought, pay off the joke, resolve the tension. You have spent years learning to deliver clean, complete, satisfying moments. Now someone is telling you to start something and walk away from it?
Yes. That is exactly what bookending requires. And it is a discipline.
You introduce an element. You let it breathe. You move on. The audience might wonder about it briefly, or they might forget about it entirely. Either outcome is fine. The bookend does not depend on the audience remembering the first half consciously. It depends on the recognition response — that moment at the end when they think, “Oh, wait — that was from the beginning!” The delight of the callback comes from the surprise of the connection, not from consciously holding the thread throughout the show.
This means you have to trust the structure. You have to believe that the payoff will work even if the audience is not actively waiting for it. And you have to resist the urge to remind them, to telegraph, to say, “Remember at the beginning when I…” Just return to the element naturally, let the audience make the connection, and watch the recognition light up their faces.
Layering Bookends
As I grew more comfortable with the basic bookend structure, I started experimenting with multiple layers. Instead of one bookend spanning my entire show, I started building two or three.
A short bookend might span just two or three effects — a joke in the first effect that pays off during the third. A medium bookend might span the first half and the second half of the show. And a long bookend might connect the opening to the finale.
When these layers work together, the audience experiences a show that feels almost impossibly cohesive. Every part seems to relate to every other part. The show feels like a single, designed experience rather than a collection of moments. And the crazy thing is, from the performer’s side, it is not that complicated. It is just a few deliberate connections, planted in the right places.
The Incomplete Show That Now Feels Whole
Looking back at my early shows — the ones that left me with that nagging feeling of incompleteness — I can see exactly what was missing. It was not a trick problem. It was not a performance problem. It was a structural problem. I had a beginning, a middle, and an end. But the beginning and the end had nothing to say to each other.
Building bookends changed that. Not by adding material, but by connecting what was already there. By starting with the end in mind. By planting seeds in the first five minutes that would bloom in the last five.
The difference this makes is difficult to overstate. My show in Vienna last autumn, at a corporate gala for about two hundred people, ended with a moment that reached all the way back to my opening minutes. The audience gasped, then laughed, then applauded — not just for the effect, but for the realization that the whole thing had been woven together from the start. I could see it in their faces: the pleasure of the pattern, the satisfaction of the circle closing.
It took me years to understand what Graham understood decades ago. A show is not a sequence of moments. It is a single experience with a beginning and an end that know about each other. The bookends are what hold everything together.
And the nagging feeling? Gone. Replaced by something much better: the quiet certainty, as I take my final bow, that the show was complete. Not just finished. Complete.
That distinction, it turns out, is everything.