The Core of the Houdini Thing

From The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero by William Kalush and Larry Sloman:

One particularly alluring performer was the beautiful Evatima Tardo, who would allow herself to be bitten on her bare shoulder by a rattlesnake, be impaled on a makeshift cross, and have her face and neck used as a cushion for dozens of pins. Her amazing tolerance for pain and resistance to poison came from an incident in her childhood in Cuba where she was bitten by a fer-de-lance, the most poisonous snake in the hemisphere. Houdini was smitten both by her beauty and her showmanship; while undergoing some of these tortures, she would blithely laugh and sing. Her end was grisly, however. Although immune to pain and poison, she fell victim to love and bullets, dying in a double-murder-suicide love triangle.

I can’t find any pics of this fascinating character. A tragedy. So, imagine, if you will, a fiction game in which the protagonists are each a performer in a wandering troupe. Maybe they’re a circus, or maybe they’re a traveling family. But two things we know for sure: they’re almost supernaturally competent at what they can do, and they’re jealous, angry, in love with, and fearful of each other in varying proportions.

First run around the barn will use The Mountain Witch‘s very elegant rules. Things will evolve as required, I’m sure.

10 thoughts on “The Core of the Houdini Thing”

  1. I think I have an issue of Jay’s Journal with a showbill featuring her; if that is useful to you I’ll check. Your idea sounds great.

  2. Well that sounds like a whole lotta fun. I pulled a book from the attic that I thought might be relevant to what you want to do, but maybe it’s not. You can still borrow it if you want, though.

  3. It’s Mata Hari: The True Story by Russell Warren Howe. Interesting biography, goes on at length a bout how she was convicted of spying for Germany, but probably wasn’t really spying. I read it 20 years ago, and the details are a little sketchy. She was executed before a firing squad in 1917. Mata Hari is one of my favorite historical figures who was portrayed as a bad guy. She was most likely just pretending to do villainy, and she pretended a little too well.

  4. OK, I checked – there are a few paragraphs on Tardo and two cites from ca. 1898 newspapers, but no images. I was thinking of Mortado, who toured much later and is easy to find. He was a human fountain originally from Germany. Among pain-insensitive freaks like Tardo, Jay also name-checks Oofty-Goofty, who I first read about in Herbert Asbury’s The Barbary Coast, and is my favorite freak ever. He’d let you hammer him with a baseball bat wherever you liked for fifty cents.

  5. Dude, I just woke up, so I’m a human fountain. Anyone can do that!

    No, wait, he’s doing something slightly different…

    (from Sideshow World)

    …In the 1930’s, Dreamland Circus Side Show in Coney Island, New York announced The Greatest new attraction of the season, Mr. Mortado, A sensation who has been appearing in Europe. He is the only living man to have been captured by savages, crucified and lived to tell about it.

    …Mortado decided to pierce his hands and feet. Thus, in the presentations after the spectacle, he no longer needed to dress the wounds, all that was necessary was for him to fill the orifices with cylindrical corks, to prevent the skin from growing back.

    Anecdotally, I’ve been told that “Mortado’s” wife was a nurse, the better to ensure that the surgically cut holes (the crucifixion angle was all showmanship) in his hands and feet remained clean/uninfected as they never healed properly. (How could they, cut as they were through such major tissue?) And he was billed as both the Crucified Man and the Living Fountain.

    Man. So weird. I mean, he cut holes in his hands and feet so that he’d have an act. It’s amazingly alien to me. It’s not a talent, it’s not a skill, it’s not even a freak of nature; the guy just did something no one else would want to do, then made up a story that states that he didn’t want to do it, either.

  6. Julia, I’d love to check out that book. Can you bring it tonight?

    For anyone else who’s reading, the Mata Hari angle and the Houdini angle aren’t really different angles. More information as I learn more.

  7. Guy, that’s not how it worked. Read the linked article. He’s punched through; the “fountain” part was just plumbing put through the holes in his extremities; there was no subterfuge in that part. They just demonstrated the holes.

    That Mirin Dajo is some crazy shit.

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