Universal City : Inventors Showcase Creative Imagination

Never underestimate the power of slime.

That message came through loud and clear Friday at a showcase of inventors and their inventions that concludes Sunday at the Sheraton Universal Hotel in Universal City.

In a makeshift exhibit hall created in the hotel’s concrete parking garage, Kerry DeLine of Science Adventures entertained rapt crowds of schoolchildren with a demonstration of “molecule-chained polymers.” Mixing liquid borax with polyvinyl alcohol, she created bowl after bowl of a glittery, gelatinous goo that she gave away in plastic cups.

“I love the exchanges with the kids,” DeLine said while mixing a fresh batch. “They never get this stuff in the classroom so it’s fascinating to them.”

It was an interesting interactive lesson for a bunch of sixth-graders at Granada Hills’ Porter Middle School, but some, like 11-year-old Joel Miller, seemed just as interested in dangling it from their noses.

“I’m gonna gross out my sister,” Jaime Lujan boasted.

Across the hall, Sherman Oaks inventor Evelyn Rosenkrantz was busy with more, uh, practical matters, explaining creations such as Aroma System, a restroom deodorizer, and Toilet Sound Waves, a clip-on speaker that “blocks out the noise of elimination,” she explained.

Alan Tratner, the brain behind the show, “Creativity in America ‘95,” said he hopes to make it a biannual presentation of the best of the country’s minds.

“People should be encouraged to take their talents and ideas and produce new businesses and products,” he said. All around him, dreamers and designers were doing just that, displaying inventions like a toilet-shaped water dish for pets and a plastic dinosaur that roared and stomped via computer commands.

“The American dream is alive and well,” Tratner said.

Indeed.