Mister Memory

You know, before I resign myself to life as an accountant again, I really should work out a stage show I can do with memory tricks. And by "I really should", I mean of course that I've been thinking about it this afternoon, and by "work out" I mean "steal from Boris". What I want to do, and I think it would look really good, is do basically what he did on a German TV show a few years ago, it goes like this:

There's a bunch of twenty or so tables, restaurant style, with two or three people sitting at each, and they each choose a meal from a menu with a choice of ten starters, ten main courses and ten drinks. I wander around each table in turn and they tell me what they're having, I memorise the whole lot without taking any notes, and then recount what everyone ordered. It'd be a piece of cake with just a little bit of advance preparation, and it'd look really good on Paul O'Grady's show or something else like that (I watch the last two minutes while waiting for the Simpsons to come on, every now and then). Then for an encore I can recite pi to a few hundred places until everyone falls asleep.

I was thinking I might like to try this, and a few other basic memory tricks, on an audience somewhere, sometime, to see how it goes over. It would be kind of a challenge for my organisational skills, but it would be cool to set up shop at the Edinburgh Festival and do a show. And I think it would be rather a groovy experience.