01 - Chinese Tickle Torture Rope Escape Challenge
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By mischief
Sunday, October 10th 2004 - 07:28:38 PM
Chinese Tickle Torture Rope Escape Challenge
Imagine this-- for as long as you can remember, you've had this fascination with being tickled by girls, but you never could find any way to make it happen while you were growing up. Then, just out of the blue one day, you find this ridiculous gimmick that makes it all happen!
That's pretty much what this post is about.
I was a real geek in high school, glasses, braces, seriously introverted, bad hair, etc. My obsession with nerdy things like computers and magic tricks didn't exactly make me Mr. Popular either. Since I didn't fit in anywhere else, I wound up with the Drama Club and that's where the Chinese Tickle Torture Rope Escape Challenge eventually started. See, I'd been interested in close-up magic (cards, coins, that sort of thing) since I was a freshman, but none of the effects I'd learned were really suitable for performing on a large stage in front of an audience. As I started digging through all these magic books looking for a new effect that was better suited for stage performance, I stumbled across a description of Harry Houdini's famous 100' Rope Escape Challenge.
For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Harry Houdini used to invite members from his audience at county fairs and such to come up on stage and bind him with 100' of rope. Then, it was up to him to escape in less time than it took for the volunteers to tie him up. If he failed, then the volunteers won a cash prize. The whole challenge dimension of the trick, the adversarial aspect, made it very popular-- as word of it spread, people would actually practice tying people up for days beforehand in the hopes of being the ones who bested Houdini. It was perfect for a stage effect.
It was also, I eventually came to realize, a great gimmick to get girls to tickle torture you without seeming like a total pervert.
I didn't have Houdini's nerve, I should mention, so rather than come right out and announce to EVERYONE that I had a new magic routine that involved a rope escape challenge, I asked one of my friends, Jessica, if she wouldn't mind helping me rehearse. She agreed and we met at her house one day to try it all out. As I was explaining the whole premise to her about the escape challenge, I added one more wrinkle that was not part of Houdini's original trick-- I told her that she was allowed to tickle torture me during the escape. That definitely got her attention! LOL
I remember being so nervous the first time that she tied me up that my fingers felt numb. It seemed to take her forever to use up all 100 feet of that rope, and by the time she was done there was so much slack in that rope that it was practically falling off of me before we even started. That first stunt was . . . well, in a word, lame. I don't remember the exact amount of time it took, but it wasn't even remotely close. I was free before she'd even really figured out where I was ticklish. To be fair to Jessica, this was the first time she had ever tied up a guy . . .
but it wasn't the last time.
You see, a funny thing happened. When I got out so easily, Jessica's competitive spirit came out. She decided she was going to figure out how to beat me at this rope escape if it was the last thing she did. We must have gotten together easily a dozen times, and each time the escape challenges got a little more complicated. First she tried different positions to make it harder for me to reach the knots; then she added a blindfold so I couldn't see the knots. Then she wanted a "five minute warm up" period so she could figure out where I was most ticklish and wear me out a little before the actual escape began. When I used my teeth to work the knots during one escape, she would cover my mouth with masking tape during the next escape. It was like a little game with us-- I'd find some new clever way to win and she'd come up with a way to counteract it in our next meeting. We joked about her being my assistant because she was helping me practice this escape stunt so often, and all that practice with Jessica was helping me when I took on other challengers! Every time we did an escape, she became better at tying me up and I got better at escaping-- until, one day, she finally beat me at the escape contest.
I remember it vividly. Instead of using the full 100' rope, we had opted for a shorter length of older "magician's rope" instead. Jessica was impressed because she knew shorter ropes meant less slack for me and the older, worn clothesline was harder to manipulate with my fingers because it wasn't stiff like the new ropes would have been. I was intentionally giving her every competitive advantage I could, because to be totally honest, I wanted her to win in this little game of ours. I wasn't willing to pretend to lose, of course, she had to legitimately beat me-- but I was more than willing to give her any condition that she asked for that would help her win.
She blindfolded and gagged me first and then she quickly lashed my wrists tightly together. At that point, she laid me down on my stomach and brought my wrists up and behind my head. She then pulled the ends of the rope down behind my back and used them to lash my ankles together as well. I was basically hogtied, but in a backbend that made it impossible for me to move or cover up.
I wasn't wearing a shirt by this time in our little game because Jessica had learned that I was more susceptible to light, grazing tickling than the harsher, digging into the ribs style of tickling and she didn't want the shirt to provide me with any protection. Once she was satisfied that I was properly tied, she started with the "warm up" tickling period-- although she knew perfectly well where I was most ticklish by this point, it had become a regular feature of our escape stunt by that time-- and she proceeded to completely wreck any concentration or physical composure I had by running her soft, grazing fingertips all over my sides, my back and my armpits. I was trying very hard to block out the tickling sensations with sheer concentration, but I wasn't doing very well.
Suddenly, as if she could sense my faltering concentration, Jessica gave the cue for me to begin the escape. I began to grope at the loops of rope around my wrists when Jessica abruptly changed up how she was tickling me. She still kept using a light touch, but she would use all ten fingers on a ticklish spot on my right side and get me squirming-- and then suddenly, her fingers would jump over to my left side and get me squirming over there. Back and forth she went, until I was so busy squirming from side to side that I couldn't even keep my fingers on the knots! She had me in the palm of her hand from that moment and she knew it. Her hit and run rib-tickling tactics kept me squirming for the whole time.
I wound up doing the "Chinese Tickle Torture Rope Escape Challenge" with something like two dozen different girls during the remainder of high school and college-- but no one I ever met was able to give me the challenging thrill and butterflies in my stomach that Jessica gave me.
mischief
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