33-year-old Mervant Vera from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was second to take the stage on Tuesday night. After leaving sports to pursue his love of the arts, Mervant combined his love of magic and music to create a never before seen act, combining sleight-of-hand with clever wordplay.
The stage lights opened on Mervant standing behind a table, with host Terry Crews sitting next to him as magician’s assistant. After pulling out a rhyme book, Mervant asked judge Heidi Klum to choose a number between 1 and 50, to which she chose 49.
After shuffling to the page, Mervant reveals the title “Inspire,” and puts it on a music stand behind him for later on in the act. He takes out a handful of flashcards with a variety of different words, asking Terry to shuffle them up. Once returned to Mervant, he announces that he will be creating a freestyle rap with the words that Terry had just mixed up.
Freestyling is a style of improvisation, in which a rapper will create lyrics on-the-spot with no prior memorization or practice. Mervant picked up the first card, labeled with the word “dream”, and began to rap over a beat. As Mervant finished each line, he picked up the next word and worked it into his rap, creating clever rhymes and staying perfectly on beat, without ever having recited these lyrics before. With each new word added, the audience was audibly impressed, clapping and cheering him on. You could see Mervant formulating each line in his head, immediately relaying it effortlessly. After a minute-long freestyle, the audience erupted into applause, including Terry on-stage.
Mervant then revealed that although Terry had shuffled the deck, and the words could have ended up in any possible order, Terry created a message. This is where the magic part of the act came in, as Mervant showed the audience that the order of the cards perfectly spelled out different inspirational messages. The audience continued to be amazed, including judge Howie Mandel, who could be heard exclaiming praise into his mic. Finally, Mervant goes back to the songbook, in which Heidi picked out the page “Inspire”. He then prompted the audience to look under their seats, where they all found and held up signs that read “Inspire” on them. Mervant received a standing ovation from everyone in the room, and the next day, landed himself third spot in the final three.
After the show ended, Celeb Secrets reporter Mandy Ward had the chance to speak with Mervant about how he was able to prepare for an act that depended so heavily on improv.
“I’m assuming that you can plan and practice the magic portion of your act, but then the freestyling is completely on the spot, since Terry was shuffling the cards,” we said to Mervant. “So how do you prepare yourself mentally, since you can’t do it physically, to do everything on-the-spot on live TV?”
“That was actually one of the most difficult performances I’ve ever done, because I’m freestyling with the cards and also doing magic,” Mervant told us. “I usually use either a dictionary and go through random words and have someone tell me what to freestyle, or programs online, random word generators. And then playing with some of the same words, I can end up mixing and matching them, kind of putting them in different ways. But, I’m also trying to make it motivational at the same time, so I’m just calculating the whole time.”
