During my time as a street performer I have had three straitjackets and each one was very different, the last one was made to measure and is still quite unique.
The straitjacket I started out with was a very inferior quality straitjacket but it had a hidden secret to help the escape and I was suckered into believing it was the way forward. It literally fell apart after the first couple of weeks of doing two shows a day.
Anna and I had witnessed a performance by an American female magician and during the performance she had performed a trick called The Thumb Tie, it was a truly awful performance lasting about 15 minutes too long and boring because of its repetitiveness. However, I was convinced the basic concept would make a great street routine but Anna was not convinced.
As I mentioned earlier one of the rings would get caught on the handle of the bag and I worked on this for a long time until it got down to a set routine.
One day while browsing through the book catalogue in Davenport's I came across a small booklet entitled "Living Marionettes" and I was intrigued so I bought it.
This routine evolved from, one day, seeing bags of different sizes in a shop. The bag I carried my act in and used in the act was a barrel-shaped bag made of tough nylon and one day I saw some bags that matched it but were of differing sizes, they even had tiny bags attached to key-rings. I immediately thought of Russian Dolls and thought it would be funny to use progressively smaller bags.