(U-WIRE) COLLEGE PARK, Md. — A light bulb, a Rubik's cube, goldfish, sugar, a billiard ball and butane fluid: all down the pipe, and then back up again. It wasn't a middle school talent show, it was 39-year-old Stevie Starr. "The Human Regurgitator" swallowed these objects and more, only to cough them up moments later, during his Tuesday night performance at the University of Maryland.

About 130 stomachs nervously watched Starr from the half-empty room UM ballroom. His first trick, swallowing a light bulb, drew applauds and "ughs" from a crowd, mute only seconds before.

The world-class entertainer has appeared in front of thousands of people live and millions of viewers through the tube, on such shows as Late Night with David Letterman, The Howard Stern Show and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, on which he has appeared 10 times.

As he meticulously organized his arsenal in a back room of the school's student union before the show, Starr flashed a suitcase with a strap completely covered in airport tags from disparate airports around the world, ranging from Japan to Argentina to Italy.

"I make about 600 flights a year" he rasped, with a thick Scottish accent, a figure that fits accordingly with the approximate 300 appearances he makes across the globe every year. His current tour whisks him across the Atlantic between North and South America and Europe until next May.

No time for family life for this entertainer. And there never has been.

He is and always has been a loner. Starr grew up in an orphanage in Glasgow, Scotland — "a misspent childhood," as he repeatedly calls it throughout his act. At the age of 4 he began swallowing his lunch money, and moved on to choking down bumblebees, only to regurgitate them and watch them fly away.

At 14, he made his first appearance at a summer camp talent show, taking first place by exposing his stomach's abilities. By the age of 18, he had perfected his act in England's nightclub circuit. There, he met his manager, and he's been swallowing indigestibles ever since.

Backstage, Starr goes over a list of the random things he actually ingests. To his diet -- high in chocolates and fast food -- he adds "millions and millions of bacon [strips]... I'll sit down and a typical evening's meal for me would be like 30 or 40 strips."

But many find his show hard to digest. When he was entered "in the bloody Guinness Book of World Records," a doctor followed him around all day — even to the bathroom — to make sure nothing was prepared.

On a request, Starr even made an appearance in Japan in front of an X-ray machine.

And that's not the wildest thing he's ever been asked. "I won this award of Best Artist on TV in Italy, and I was going back to Malta the next day. At the airport I was approached by these three guys in suits. And they said 'Would you like to work for us?' and I thought it was TV or something ... and they told me who they were. They wanted me to go and smuggle diamonds from Africa and back." He didn't accept, but said he could have held at least 400 tiny diamonds in his stomach.

But there were no African diamond-runners at the UM show last night; mostly curious students and some fanatics. In the middle of his show, Starr recognized one older white-haired man holding a professional camera, and said "Oh, a follower." The man introduced himself as T.D. Toler from northern Virginia, and confessed to have rented the camera specifically to get shots of Starr. Toler has seen Starr four different times in the Washington area since he first saw him on the Tonight Show.

"It was fascinating to me ... I was so amazed by it I couldn't figure out if it was a magic trick or a real talent," Toler said.

Starr performed a medley of acts shadowing simple swallowing and regurgitating. Starr swallowed eight women's rings, and promised to hypnotize one of them and make her swallow a goldfish before he gave her ring back. The girl bounced quickly off the stage nervously repeating "keep the ring."

In another stunt, he swallowed a man's ring, a locked lock and a key. A brunette in the front row sat with her jaw on the ground as the man smacked his bare chest and reproduced the ring -- looped inside the lock.

"Sick, huh? Sick, but I'm f---ing rich," Starr said to his amazed audience.

After the show, UM engineering major David Shaw laughed, "I almost puked twice ... I liked the billiard ball because he could barely suck it down." He gave the verdict of a "funny and amazing" show.

Julie Siegal, a sophomore English major, said "I'm surprised there aren't more people."

Starr would have found sense in the buzz he created. "I get the same reaction wherever I go because (the act is) so unusual," he said.

He usually performs at colleges, universities and clubs. He finds rave clubs especially amusing. "It's funny when you see ravers stoned out of their brains ... you get 2,000 people and you can hear a pin drop when I first swallow the light bulb."

— Jorge Valencia