Tasteless

Warning

This is absolutely one of the most disgusting ideas I’ve ever come up with. I had this idea about 8 or 9 years ago. It’s gross, but the effect is about as pure as it gets. If you’re willing to be this disgusting, you’ll have a true moment of astonishment. The beauty(?) of this effect is that the majority of the disgusting part is unknown to the audience. Mostly, they experience the moment of astonishment. You be the judge.

Effect

You take a persons ABC (Already Been Chewed) gum and magically restore it to a whole piece of gum. You can do this effect naked, and when you’re done you are 100% clean.

Method

Here’s the gross part. Back in high school – I’m ashamed (read: proud) to admit – I had no problem grossing other people out by eating someone else’s ABC gum. I had restrictions of course . . . First it had to be from an attractive girl. I guess that was it. If she was hot, and I could talk her into handing me her gum from her mouth, I would chew it just to gross out other people while secretly fantasizing that I was making out with her by proxy. So that’s the method. If you’re willing to secretly eat someone else’s gum, you can do this. If not, stop reading now. Of course, they don’t know that you’re eating their ABC gum, so there’s minimal gross out factor from the audience’s perspective.

Details

Of course, I’m not advocating eating the ABC gum of a stranger. You never know what diseases they have. However, this is the kind of thing that you might do in a social setting where you know the people pretty well and there is someone in the group who A) you know the brand of gum they chew, and B) you’re willing to secretly eat their ABC gum. If those requirements are met you’ve got the makings of a moment of astonishment.

If you know ahead of time what kind of gum they chew, you bring with you a pack of that kind of gum – this works much better with stick gum (think Big Red, Wrigley’s, etc) rather than Orbit style gum or the square blister pack Chiclet looking stuff.

The method is simple. Have an unwraped piece of the gum in finger palm in your right hand so that the stick of gum is parallel to your right middle finger running directly beneath it. You take the ABC gum in your left hand in Spellbound position. Then you perform Spellbound leaving the fresh stick of gum directly on top of the ABC gum. The ABC gum will stick to the back of the fresh piece.

From the audience’s perspective, the only gross part is the fact that you’ve handled the person’s ABC gum – granted, that IS gross. However, putting aside the gross-factor for a moment, you have a true miracle. From the audience perspective (particularly the gum chewer), you took her piece of gum (say Big Red) and passed your hand over it, and it completely restored. The miracle is at least two-fold. First, the fact that her gum is Big Red and you now have a whole, fresh stick of Big Red is a miracle.

If it were some kind of switch, she wonders, how did he know what kind of gum it would be? Secondly, your hands are completely empty except for the fresh piece of gum. They can’t see the ABC stuck beneath it. That’s a freakin’ miracle. Then comes the clean up which is only gross to you. You eat the newly created stick of gum and (secretly) the ABC gum. You put it in your mouth, and you are totally clean (except for the ABC gum germs).

Of course, you can do this with your own gum from your own mouth, but what makes this so powerful is the fact that (from the audience perspective), you could have chosen anyone in the group and whatever gum they were chewing would have been restored. They think that you could have taken Bob’s banana flavored gum instead of Cindy’s Big Red and restored his piece to a piece of unchewed banana gum. That’s a miracle folks.

Final Thoughts

Remember, from the audience perspective, the only gross part is that you touched someone else’s ABC gum. They have no idea that you ate it too. Those of you who read my review of Jeff Prace’s DVD, Gum will of course instantly realize what may appear to be hypocrisy. I was not a fan of the effects where he appeared to handle his chewed gum. I’m still not a fan of that. In the Prace video it was demonstrated as an effect done in a “formal” presentational situation . . . at a restaurant and/or in a situation “on the streets” where a crowd of strangers where drawn in.

This is slightly different in that it would be done for someone you know, and it’s not meant to be a performance piece. In High School the gag of eating ABC gum went like this “Hey do you have any more gum?” She says, “No, only the one I’m chewing.” I say, “That’s fine, I’ll take it.” She jokingly pulls it out of her mouth and mock-hands it to me. I take it and eat it. This would go down in a similar fashion. When the person says that they don’t have any gum, I would offer to take the one they’re chewing. Then I would restore it.

I haven’t eaten a person’s ABC gum since High School, and I’ve never performed the above described trick. I have performed it only for myself to test the method, but have never done it in a real setting and I likely never will . . . not because I’m unwilling to eat ABC gum (although the appeal goes away with every passing year), but rather because handling someone else’s ABC gum could gross out innocent bystanders. However, I know that those may not be limitations for many of you, so I figured I share. I’ll likely never publish this in any place where I’m charging money for it unless the focus of the publication was less about the trick and the gum and more about some other subject such as creativity or following your ideas to see where they lead, etc.

That being said, don’t be a hater. Take the trick for what it’s worth . . . a crazy idea I had nearly a decade ago. If you like it, great; use it. If you hate it, great; don’t use it and take comfort in the fact that you didn’t have to pay for it.