Hubbub in a Bubble
David Blaine Quenches His Thirst for Attention, And Darned if the Public Doesn't Drink It Up

By Robin Givhan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 6, 2006

NEW YORK, May 5

The eight-foot Plexiglas sphere, filled with 2,000 gallons of warm salt water, sits in the middle of Lincoln Center Plaza. On this clear spring day it sparkles pale blue like an enormous shooter marble. David Blaine is inside this giant aquarium, tethered to an oxygen hose and floating around like a giant Sea-Monkey. The only things missing are fuchsia rocks, fake coral reefs and a plastic treasure chest.

Blaine, whom some call an illusionist, submerged himself in the tank at 1 p.m. on May 1. He will remain under water, hooked up to his breathing apparatus, until Monday evening. Then he will, on live television, be entangled in 150 pounds of chains. He will relinquish his oxygen mask and attempt to free himself while also holding his breath for nine minutes. He will try very hard not to die on live TV.

"Well, he's not breaking the law," correctly notes the nonjudgmental Mary Rhodd, who is visiting from Des Moines. She is taking in the Blaine spectacle for the second time this week after rounding up her son and daughter-in-law for a look-see.

"It's not a negative thing," she says. "So why not?"

Possible brain damage during the finale is one deterrent. After human skin sits in a tank of water for an extended period of time, it starts to get all bleached out, thin, wrinkled, blistered and fragile. It hurts. It looks profoundly disgusting. And there are all those people standing around, staring and taking pictures like they're at the zoo. There was a traffic jam of elementary-school kids on the plaza, nannies with their toddler charges, mommies creating Bugaboo gridlock. You just know they'd feed Blaine peanuts if they could.

Friday morning, there's a line of about 50 people waiting to climb onto a platform that abuts the sphere. From there, viewers take pictures with their cell phones, give Blaine the thumbs-up sign and press their hands against the tank in solidarity with the man inside whose sanity is repeatedly questioned by many of those standing on the plaza.

"I just wanted to come see the sheer level of stupidity," says Joe Rhodd, who is Mary Rhodd's son and proof that a nonjudgmental attitude does not necessarily run in families. "Why the hell else would you sit in a bubble?"

Money, notoriety, attention, the feeling of being invincible . . . boredom?

If the idea of a human being pretending to be a fish sounds strange, the sight of such a thing is bizarre. Let's just dispense with political correctness, niceties and diplomacy and call this what it is: an old-fashioned freak show. Bring on the bearded lady.

Blaine's sphere sits just off Broadway and is a stone's throw from Juilliard, the New York City Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera and a host of other high-minded and august institutions. It is a tantalizing juxtaposition.

The sphere, which is set on a metal pedestal, has a rather serene quality until one notices the stretcher tucked ominously just below it. To watch over the sphere, ABC has hired a security team of men wearing dark blazers and earpieces. They are joined by uniformed Lincoln Center security. No one seems particularly worried that anyone is going to break the sphere; it's several inches thick, after all. But this is a city of strange people and who knows, someone might try to climb in there with him. "David, I love you!" Splash!

Lincoln Center guard Marvin Spruill is one of the men charged with protecting Blaine from untoward behavior. He has a job to do but he can't say that he approves of Blaine's antics, noting that you'd never find him involved in such silliness, especially because he can't swim. When it's pointed out that he wouldn't really need to swim, he comes oh so close to suggesting that the whole thing is just incredibly ridiculous but he doesn't because that would be unprofessional and he needs his job. (But this is just a day job, he'll have you know, because he's really an actor and you can see him in an upcoming independent film and in the August issue of Essence magazine.)

Blaine takes no breaks from the tank. He fasted before this endurance test so that he would not have to worry about solid waste and what to do with it. A catheter takes care of anything else. He's fed a liquid diet that is golden yellow and comes in a plastic pouch. In the late morning, one of his handlers climbed atop the sphere, opened the lid and dropped a packet of food inside. Blaine settled down to the bottom and quietly began to squeeze the liquid into his feeding tube. One could almost hear the collective sigh of disappointment as the onlookers watched Blaine's activity level drop precipitously. They realized they had the kind of bad timing akin to arriving at the National Zoo only to find Tai Shan taking a nap.

The resemblance to the panda exhibit was pointed out by Jeff Glancy, who is in the Navy and was visiting from Richmond. He was surprised that the atmosphere surrounding Blaine was like "a circus," as he'd expected the sphere to be tucked unobtrusively into a corner with only a handful of people surrounding it.

Clearly Glancy is not familiar with Blaine, who is a master showman. Over the years, he has been buried alive for seven days in a glass coffin. He has encased himself in ice for 61 hours, balanced on a 22-inch-wide platform high above New York's Bryant Park and fasted for 44 days in an acrylic box suspended over the Thames River in London. The British were not so welcoming of his type of exhibitionism. They threw things at him.

Blaine fancies himself a modern-day Harry Houdini and the $25 poster for his "Drowned Alive" boy-in-a-bubble extravaganza resembles an old-fashioned Houdini advertisement. It shows Blaine naked, except for a pair of tight shorts, and bound in chains. He's all muscled-out like a cover boy for Men's Health.

Inside the sphere, Blaine looks like the Incredible Hulk because the water and the curvature of the tank magnify and distort his appearance. It is hard to see his face at the moment because it is inside an enormous diving helmet equipped with cameras. But his eyes are clearly visible.

"If you look him straight in the face, he looks weird," says Keith Price, a New Yorker leaning on one of the metal crowd-control barriers and pondering the whole affair. "But then, that's what it takes to try this, a weird person."

By Friday, Day 5 of Blaine's week-long submergence, he is no longer as cute as a baby panda because his skin is beginning to pucker and blister. At one point, Blaine, crouched on the bottom of his sphere, removes one of his gloves to examine his hand, which caused Price to gasp, "Ooh-wee! He's crazy to be in water that long!"

Yet if observers are honest, they will ask this question: Which is more grotesque: the guy in the water? Or the people standing around watching him?

"He is courageous, but I don't know if the elevator is going all the way to the top floor," says Sharon Epperson, who is studying social work. "But I have to question myself, too. This is my second trip here. Am I crazy?" She is hoping to come back Monday night to watch him hold his breath.

What is the attraction to Blaine? Is he brave or crazy? Many people at Lincoln Center seem to feel that he's a bit of both. Is this magic or an athletic feat? Are people drawn to watch him out of admiration or because this is a sideshow to which they feel compelled to bear witness?

Blaine, 33, can perform mind-boggling card tricks. He is an illusionist who has made people believe he can levitate a foot off the ground. But he has moved away from tricks that display skill and cleverness to those based solely on endurance and showmanship. He pushes his body and his mind to their limits. Some might argue that he is a fine athlete in the tradition of ultramarathoners who run more than 100 miles, oftentimes through the desert. After all, in holding his breath for nine minutes, he is emulating the accomplishments of free divers who are known to descend hundreds of feet without oxygen. The record for static apnea, which is what Blaine is attempting, is 8 minutes 58 seconds and is held by German Tom Sietas. (Accomplishing such feats involves all sorts of physiological hocus-pocus, including lowering the heart rate, altering carbon dioxide production, etc.)

But Nathan Collier, who divides his time between New York and Florida, isn't buying the idea of Blaine as an extreme athlete. "You need to have a skill to run a marathon rather than just endurance," he says. "You don't do a marathon as an exhibitionist. People hike to the South Pole for discovery and science. You don't see anyone from the national center of oceanics here, do you?"

What made Chris Scharing, a businessman in a dark suit, stop in the middle of his workday? "I have no idea," he says laughing, appalled, dismissive. He was hard-pressed to even pinpoint the talent required to pull off such a stunt. "You've got to have discipline, I suppose."

For others, Blaine represented an opportunity to see something unbelievable. "I've never seen anything like this before in my whole life!" Epperson says, videotaping a bobbing Blaine. To a fifth-grade class from the Bilingual Bicultural Mini School in East Harlem, it was a chance to experience some of the G-rated madness of Manhattan -- to be "part of the parade," as their teacher, Kathy Ortiz, says.

And beyond the exhibitionism, the discipline and -- possibly -- the courage, there is this: "He's testing his limits," muses Price. "After a while you'd believe you can do almost anything."