The Human Sacrifice involved Gorsich chained atop what looked like a triple bunk bed that was torched. You've probably seen dead people disposed of in this ritual fashion on National Geographic specials. The audience was told he would have a minute to break free before the flames reached him; he was engulfed in about 15 seconds.
"A lot of people thought it was a 911 situation," he says, laughing. "But we never did that again."
For Buried Alive, Gorsich and his loyal crew of buddies "would go out on construction sites and talk to the backhoe operators, and we did some small rehearsals, never at that depth [of seven feet]. I needed to know what it was like to be covered with dirt. That was important, so your mind knows what to expect. Three days after we did Buried Alive, a guy did it in California and died. He was in a box and they poured concrete on him. It didn't seem like he researched it very well."
Right now, the Mystifying Gorsich is in something of a holding pattern. He can't fit into his straitjacket anymore (it's a medium, remember) but he's hardly ready to slide back into making balloon animals at birthday parties. He misses the fumes of the gas as it soaked into his sweat shirt, the way the blood rushed to his head as he hung upside down from a crane 50 feet in the air, yanking his arms out of bondage. The creative mind of a dyed-in-the-wool escape man is always churning.
"I've got a list of ideas," he says. "There's one where I pump water into a glass tank and struggle to get out from a straitjacket or shackles or whatever. The tank slowly starts to fill up, and the audience can watch me take that last breath and finish the escape. You know, that's one idea."
Audience belief is something that is paramount to Gorsich's personal code of mystification.
"I feel that if you're in a grave or something like that, the audience should see you digging through. With Copperfield or someone, sometimes they're put into one situation and all of a sudden they come walking out of the crowd, or a helicopter lands and they come out of that; there's a lot of flash and flair. I like the more ruggedness of it where they see you go in, they see you come out."
So, Mystifying Gorsich, so, Bob: why, why, why, why, why?
He seems a bit puzzled anyone would even ask.
"I'm a thrill seeker. I guess that's the best way to describe it."
--Gilstrap
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