Episode #52 – Alexanderia, The Housewife Houdini

Posted by Wayne Keyser on March 30, 2012

EPISODE #53 – March 31, 2012

ALEXANDERIA

The Housewife Houdini

Download standard podcast mp3 file – Episode 52
(right-click and “save as”…)

Alexanderia (Donna Purnell)

Alexanderia’s Trademark “Underwater Leap of Faith” Escape

Alexanderia is shackled hands and feet with 4 padlocks. Then a 15 pound lead weight is attached to her waist. Then a 5 foot chain shackles her hands to her feet. 20 feet of additional chain is wrapped around her arms twice and each wrap is padlocked. The remaining chain is pulled around her neck, through her legs, around her neck again and padlocked. The shackles, chains, lead weight belt and 9 padlocks weigh over 55 lbs, more than twice what Harry Houdini did in his escapes.

The Underwater Cell
(Houdini’s Milk Can – Outdone!)

Alex enters a specially-built small glass cube filled with water. Her hands are shackled and padlocked.
A lid is then locked on top of the cube, trapping her underwater. Unlike Houdini’s famed Milk Can Escape, no curtain is lowered so she can be seen at all times. For this attempt the tank, because of the venue, was filled with bone-chilling 52-degree water.

Chain Escape … With Plastic-Wrap

BRILL PLANS
PSEUDO-HYPNOTIC ACT

A sideshow-style hypno act
with 4 detailed routines, crowd-pleasers like
“The Rigid Arm,” “Standing 3 Men
on the Subject’s Chest,”
“Stopping the Pulse” and
“Breaking a Stone on the Chest”.

Select your favorite individual effects
or perform the entire set of effects
as a complete 25-minute act,
the manuscript is a detailed guide to presentation.
Available in pdf format or paper copy.
For a real piece of carnival history
or a working act that still plays well today

FAIR FOOD RECIPE

Easy Fresh Pickles

If this isn’t a fair food, it ought to be. Here’s something that ought to go over big in hot weather. Make a solution of about 50-50 white vinegar and water. Bring it to a boil, dissolve sugar in it until you like the balance, remove it from the heat and throw in whatever you want pickled, put on a lid, and come back later when it’s cool enough to refrigerate. That’s all! The vegetable will pick up all the flavor and almost no calories, and if you keep it in a plastic tub in the fridge moistened with the pickling liquid, your pickle should last for several weeks. You can just make it in a half hour and eat it for weeks. I love bite-size chunks of peeled raw beets. As a sandwich garnish, I use chopped pickled raw onion, or carrot, or if I’m feeling hungry for Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches I use daikon radish peeled and sliced in the food processor, or a mixture of carrot and daikon and onion. Add more sugar and some drained canned green beans, wax beans, kidney beans and chick peas, and you’ve got three (well, really four) bean salad. This is a bit of a stretch from the usual carnival food, but it really makes me happy!