Dirty Laundry

You bring a bag of your laundry to a friend’s house. The laundry is a mix of whites and colors. You reassure her that nothing in there is too gross.

You have her go into the laundry room without you. Following a random procedure, you direct her to place some of the clothes into the washing machine and some of the clothes into the dryer. You legitimately have no idea what clothes are where.

She starts up the dryer.

You enter the room and conclude the effect in one of two ways:

If the dryer has a glass door, you are able to take a half-second glance at the spinning laundry and tell her the breakdown between whites and colors in the dryer.

If the dryer has no glass door, then you push yourself up and sit on top of it and—via the vibrations to your anus—you are able to tell the breakdown between whites and colors.

Method

Miraskill with laundry.

(If you don’t know Miraskill, look it up. There are plenty of places to learn it.)

Instead of predicting red/black, you’re predicting whites/colors. You’ll want a variety of different types of clothing in each group. (In other words, don’t just have all white socks, and then shirts and pants of color.)

Your spectator will remove two items, blindly, at a time. If they’re one of each (one white/one color) she’ll throw them in the washing machine. If they match (both white or both colors), she’ll throw them in the dryer. You’ll want to walk her through the process a couple times from the other room.

Don’t use your actual disgusting dirty laundry. Wash it first and then put it back in the laundry bag.

The first time I tried this, the person suggested I had a camera in the laundry room. That’s why I recommend doing it at someone else’s house.

The only other time I did this, I did it with my friend’s clothes, instead of mine. We raided her underwear drawer and I asked her to remove a bunch of patterned underwear, and then a bunch of solid color ones, and I just kept track of the number of each that we removed from her drawer so I could figure out what the Miraskill result would be.

(I told her I wanted to improve my pervert skills by enhancing my psychic powers. “When you go to the laundromat to steal panties, you don’t want to be digging around in a bunch of different washers and dryers to find the right pair. So many times I’ve ended up pulling out some children’s underwear. I’m not that kind of creep! Or I’ll pull out some large, floppy granny-panties. What am I supposed to do with that? They’re too bulky. How am I supposed to tie that around my scrotum sack in order to get myself off?” I then introduce the Miraskill process as a procedure I’m using to develop my pervert intuition to be able to hone in on what machine holds the perfect pair for me. I’m still at the early stages, and I can just pick up on some basic traits of the garments. This is, admittedly, not a presentation suitable for many audiences (or performers)).

You can wrap this up a few different ways:

You could predict the outcome.

If the dryer has a glass door you can act like this is a feat of lightning perception.

I like the idea of sitting on the dryer and picking up something based on the way it’s spinning. If you don’t want to sit on it, then you could just place your hand on the dryer. Maybe pull out a dry erase marker and start writing down calculations on top of the machine.

Or you could have an odd number of garments in the bag. This would leave one left at the end (and whether it’s white or colored would change your final revelation). You could ask for the final item of clothing and rub and stretch the fabric between your hands as you furrow your brow and act like—based on this final item—you are able to reconstruct exactly how the other items were removed, and what the net result in the dryer will be, like a useless Sherlock Holmes.