Once again the music fades out, and in comes an instrumental hip hop beat, signaling the beginning of the next trick. While Stacy and Claire roll the gong away Nora goes and fetches another bizarre prop, having the appearance of a large hexagonal box. It stands upright and looks tall enough to accommodate a person. The front side, elaborately painted in a style that’s reminiscent of circus posters, is divided in triangles numbered one through six clockwise. The top and bottom section, which are number one and four respectively, have a lunette-shaped opening at the base. Numbers two and five have a big round hole in the middle, while numbers three and six have none whatsoever.
The box is standing at the left end, from the point of view of the audience, of a platform truck that’s at least twice as long. The other half of the platform is occupied by something thin and angular that looks like a four-legged stool, or maybe a pair of trestles. At second glance, it turns out to be actually an arrangement of blades. They are the same, ever-present kind of rectangular blade with handle, and there are eight in total, stacked like cards in a card house.
Nora lets go of the hand truck and sits cross-legged on the top of the blades just as her daughters come back on stage. Looking at Stacy, she points imperiously at her own foot. The girl scuttles over, takes off her mother’s high-heeled shoe and, handling it with nothing short of reverence, puts it down between the blades and the hexagon box. Nora crosses her legs the other way and shifts her gaze to Claire, who takes care of the remaining shoe with as much veneration. As the lady magician stands up, her assistants take position on either side of the hexagon and open it up by turning all six triangles outwards. The inside is unpainted, not very deep, and clearly empty.
Nora gets in the box in only two leggy steps, whereupon Stacy and Claire close the triangular doors on her. The woman’s face and feet remain visible through the lunettes in the top and bottom sections, and her hands stick out of the holes in sections two and five. While Stacy fiddles with Nora’s hands to prove that they are real, Claire picks up two blades and holds them above her head for all to see, mirror-slick and razor-sharp. One right after the other, the girl hands them over to her sister who shoves them into the front of the box below Nora’s left hand, between sections two and three. The woman bites her lip, her fingers twitching like the legs of an electrocuted spider. She closes her eyes and frowns, nostrils wide with the intake, as the second pair of blades goes in next to the first, dividing the box horizontally in two trapezoids.
Amid mild applause, the girls each take two of the remaining blades and slide them all into the box, still at the middle but from the sides. Nora doesn’t flinch. Her eyes are open now, but blank, gazing into nothing.
Stacy and Claire exchange a high five before taking position, the former in the middle of the platform and the latter on the opposite side of the big box. With Claire pushing and Stacy pulling, the top trapezoid hinges away from the bottom one and comes to rest next to it, on the right half of the platform, where the blades had been initially. Nora’s face, now turned upside down and level with her own feet, is one of disquiet. Her hair is collected on the ground under the top of her head, with parts of it spilling out of the box.
The girls climb onto the inverted trapezoids, standing on the blades that form their longer base. Claire is on the left, and under her are sections five and four, occupied by Nora’s hand and feet respectively, followed by number three which has no holes. Next, left to right under Stacy, are Nora’s other hand in section two and her face in section one, with number six showing nothing just like number three. The woman’s shoes, untouched, are still in the middle of the platform, in the triangular gap that separates the two trapezoids.
After a brief dance number, synchronized and mostly consisting of basic hip hop moves, the girls use their left foot to flip open the triangular doors numbered three and six, revealing that nothing is inside there. Door number three ends up covering the triangular gap in the process, hiding Nora’s shoes from view. The lady magician pulls back her hands just an instant before sections five and two are opened and shown to contain nothing as well, with door number five layering itself over number three in the middle of the platform. Never looking away from the audience, Claire and Stacy squat in unison and pinch hold of the remaining triangles. Their mother’s feet and head slide back into what’s left of the box as if there was enough room to, and one moment later the doors are hitting the ground and Nora isn’t there. She’s nowhere to be seen, both halves of the box are absolutely empty.
The cheering is overcome by a sudden double bang as Nora bursts out leaping from behind doors five and three. The woman hits the ground hands first and rolls to her feet, posing for an applause that comes roaring after a moment of stunned delay. She is panting a little, and has both her smile and her shoes back on.
Nora turns around to face her daughters, who are gaping at her in surprise, and points at the trapezoids beneath their feet, commanding them to get in. The girls are quick to oblige. It is a pretty tight fit, forcing them to fold their legs in order to cram themselves in. When the lady magician closes the doors again, all that remains visible are the girls’ faces, through the holes where Nora’s hands had been, and their feet tucked against their buttocks in the lunette-shaped openings. It’s blue socks on orange shorts for Claire, at the left-side end of the platform, and orange on blue for Stacy. The girls’ knees, along with a good portion of their legs, are hidden behind doors number three and six.
The lady magician slides out two blades from the top of Claire’s trapezoid, the ones whose handles are on the front side, and puts them back inside between her daughter’s head and the rest of her body, beheading her. The girl squeezes her eyes shut, then blinks repeatedly as she slowly exhales. Nora does the same to Stacy, then lifts the girl’s trapezoid back onto the other one, restoring the box to its pristine hexagonal shape. The handles of the four blades that she has just rearranged are now forming a line from the bottom-left to the top-right corner of the hexagon, splitting it in half diagonally. Standing to the right of the box, Nora pulls out two of the other four blades, the ones crossing it horizontally. By doing so, she connects section two having Stacy’s head in it with sections three and four, which contain the body with blue socks on. The girl’s face is still upturned relative to said body’s feet, yet she mouths her relief. Sections two through four open up from the inside, revealing that the young assistant is unharmed and in one piece, though in a painfully twisted position. The colors of her outfit are all inverted: she now has a blue top and socks with orange shorts, exactly what her sister had on when they entered the trapezoids.
Stacy crawls out and immediately checks herself out, ignoring the applause. She seems happy to be almost back to her original self. Behind her back Nora removes the other two horizontal blades, and the last three doors open on an upside-down Claire, whom the woman helps cartwheel out of the box.
Hand in hand, the three performers take a bow.
The next song is, in a departure from the previous nondescript background music, Madonna’s hit “Dress you up”. As the opening four snare hits signal the beginning of the song, Nora drags the hexagonal box away and her daughters trot off in the opposite direction, soon returning with a tall cabinet for the upcoming trick. It looks very minimal, just plain white wood with a single door that takes up the whole of the front side.
Nora gets back just as Stacy opens up the cabinet. Inside is what looks to be a paper shredder, which the lady magician takes out and positions next to the cabinet. By doing so she uncovers, inside a holder hanging on the back wall, what seems to be a book or a magazine. Claire takes it out to have a look, and Stacy joins in. The book is a sticker album entitled “Dress me up”, and on its cover is a full-figure photo of Nora wearing exactly the same stage attire as now. The photo is itself a sticker, as becomes apparent when Claire peels it off the cover. Stacy motions for Nora to enter the cabinet and shuts her in, whereupon Claire sticks the photo onto the door. At this point Stacy gives a face like she just noticed something. She pinches at the figure’s cleavage and pulls down, stripping it of its paper clothes. Leotard, nylons and pumps come off at once, connected in a single picture but on a different layer from the body underneath, which is completely naked, its nipples and crotch censored out via star-shaped flares. Claire holds a hand to her face in mock surprise, watching her sister turn on the paper shredder and feed Nora’s stage outfit into the machine. She opens her album and, from the first page, produces an image of a Little Red Riding Hood costume, which she fits onto her mother’s nude photo. Stacy opens the cabinet, and inside is Nora cosplaying as the iconic fairy tale character, complete with pigtails and even holding a wicker basket.
Barely the time to acknowledge the applause, and the door is closed again, the outfit removed and shredded to pieces, then replaced with a graduation robe and hat which Nora is shown to be wearing. The quick change stunt goes on and on, with the girls flipping through the album and superimposing the most varied outfits on Nora’s photo. Wonder Woman, a cowgirl, a bride, a fairy who may or may not be Tinker Bell, a pirate, a beer fest waitress, Rosie the Riveter, an astronaut, a harem dancer, a scuba diver: each change is faster than the last as Stacy and Claire level up their teamwork.
That is, until the Lara Croft costume turns up. Like some of its predecessors, it actually consists of two separate stickers for the bottom and top parts. Something goes wrong and, maybe due to haste, the tank top does not stick in place and falls off right before the door is opened. A topless Nora, with star-shaped pasties on her nipples, jumps in shock with a yelp and covers herself, to which Stacy, equally panicked, slams the door shut. Claire picks up the missing sticker and slaps it onto her mother’s photo, smoothing it out over and over again. When the girls finally dare to check into the cabinet, Nora is found to be wearing a tank top with cargo shorts and a pair of sunglasses, her hair in a long braid. Most importantly, she’s holding a gun in each hand looking very, very angry.
The girls are quick to close the door again, and the very next moment gunshots explode from the other side. Stacy tears off the bottom part of the Lara Croft sticker and disposes of it, immediately followed by the top part which Claire hands out to her. Too bad that an entire half of Nora’s photo has come away with it, leaving behind just her legs up to panty line. The girls only realize when it’s too late, and for a while they just stand there unsure what to do, looking worriedly at the cabinet. Neither wants to be the one who will assess the situation, and they push and pull each other until eventually Stacy gives up and opens the door. A collective “aah” rises from the crowd: a living pair of legs is standing inside the cabinet, naked but for a star-shaped patch on the groin, tapping angrily on one foot.
Stacy closes the door, removes what’s left of Nora’s picture and feeds it into the shredder, then motions at the cabinet with her eyes on her sister. Not without some hesitation, Claire re-opens the door: nothing is inside now, the lady magician has completely vanished.
Ignoring the applause, the girls now turn their attention to each other. Especially to each other’s shorts, whose colors are still mismatching. They seem at a loss as to what to do. Claire turns the last few pages of the album, then finds something on the back cover and shows it to her sister: it’s a photo of the two of them, in just the same clothes as they are.
Excited, they stick the photo onto the door and enter the cabinet together, struggling for space. Stacy reaches out and manages to close the door. After some tense moments of waiting the girls come back out, but nothing has changed. Claire tries peeling off the shorts from her photographed self, and finds that she can do it. Under the shorts are plain white panties. Stacy does the same, uncovering identical panties on her own picture, then she trades her sticker for her sister’s. With everything in its right place, the girls hop back inside. The door is closed, then opened. Still, nothing has happened. The magic just isn’t working.
The two assistants make a show of thinking for a while, scratching their heads and walking in circles. Suddenly Claire’s eyes light up with an idea. She whispers into her sister’s ear, and Stacy smiles broadly. With swift and resolute moves, the girls pull down their shorts in unison, exposing white panties underneath, then step out of them and into each other’s. Satisfied, they exchange a vigorous handshake that elicits laughter from the hall, then put everything back into the cabinet and take it away with them off stage.
The show is over.
“Still,” says a lady in the front rows, clapping her hands, “they wouldn’t be back to their original selves.”
“‘Course not,” her husband snorts. “They still have each other’s ass! That’s hilarious.”
“Don’t be so crude, Eugene. I wasn’t talking about that. I mean, even if they did manage to swap their hips in the end, there would still be something wrong. Some parts that are on the wrong girl.”
“Huh? What are you talking about?”
“You haven't been paying attention, Eugene. And here I thought you were so attentively watching.”
The man frowns. “Enough with the riddles. What the hell are you talking about?”
“Come on,” his wife smirks at him. “Think carefully.”