David Blaine: Drowned Alive? Part III
Posted By Paul Kotik on 4 May 2006
Freedive Manhattan!
Now for everybody, not just a media icon in a crystalline sphere. I rode the subway train to Lincoln Center today, and must have set some kind of world record myself. Serial static apnea, or maybe surreal static apnea – what one does when the train car is packed with sweating humanity and stinks, stinks, stinks.
David Is Experiencing Extreme Fatigue was the tag line for a full-throttle press conference this afternoon. Dr. Gunel and Kirk Krack faced the braying legion of reporters and delivered this news in several variations until, finally, all of them more or less got it. "It feels like I’m giving the State of the Union address", Kirk told me later. "It’s like a wall of cameras, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FNC, BBC…." Yessir, if it pushes images and has a ‘C’ in the corporate acronym, it’s there.
Krack and Gunel left the microphones, but the media stayed on. The faces change – well, not much, really – but the cameras stay the same. I huddled with Kirk and Martin, trying in vain to swindle them into disclosing the pulse oximeter reading they’d done on David, when a grip shouted down from the ramp. “ Yo, Kirk. Hands.” Kirk and Martin scrambled.
Copyright 2006 Paul Kotik/DeeperBlue.net
Grips swung the rather sinister iron ladder into place, centering the platform above the hatch, which a grip popped open. Kirk and Martin were already halfway up the ladder when the word came down: David wants Vivianna ! A startled young woman sprang up from her folding chair in the crew pen and uncertainly made her way toward the sphere.
David Blaine’s hands are the first visible casualty of this enterprise. He’s having his gloves swapped and his hands moisturized and massaged at intervals of several hours now. This time he wanted his personal assistant, Vivianna Karamanis, on the platform and tending to his ravaged mitts.
Kirk, atop the platform and hovering over the crouching Vivianna, signaled to me. I climbed the ladder and peered over Vivianna’s crouching form, down into the sphere. David Blaine does not take his head out of the water during these maintenance sessions. His forearms leave the water, and Vivianna rubbed them gingerly.
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