By Abby Cianciolo
Staff Writer
Hypnosis, the state of consciousness where one loses total control over their mind and actions. Now, when most of us think of this term, it reminds us of crazy children’s shows we see on television, the ones with a crazy magician sending the characters into a transe and resulting in spinning eyes and causing them to go into crazy tasks.
Well maybe those kids’ shows weren’t all wrong. This past Wednesday, Westford Academy’s DECA club held a hypnotist show in the Performing Arts Center. The show was put on by Frank Santos. Twenty four students from the audience were selected. After a short test to determine each participant’s ability to respond to the hypnosis, twelve students remained on the stage and the show went into full swing.
Overall, the show was a huge success. Students laughed and were amazed by the talents of Frank Santos Jr., a highly skilled hypnotist, as he used hypnosis to make the students believe and do crazy activities. The students hypnotized were Sara Goode, Ryan Murphy, Matthew Warner, Richa Kaul, Nick Walsh, Sarah Oughton, Matt Higgins, Shannon Green, Pat O’Neil, Kaylie Boyd, Annie Hickey, and DECA Advisor Adam Gagne.
The first hypnosis activity consisted on hypnotizing the students to believe their arms were extremely stiff. Santos then went around to see if any of the students could bend their arms. However, under their hypnosis, none of the students could do so.
Following this activity, Santos hypnotized the students to believe that their tongues were glued to the outside of their lips. Most of the students looked extremely confused during this time, much to the audience’s amusement. Each student was then asked their name, which came out in a mumble of words the audience couldn’t decipher.
One scheme Santos put on was making some of the female students believe they were in need of going to the bathroom. However, once they reached halfway up the stairs, the urge was gone, but then returned as soon as they got back on the stage. For the boys, Santos hypnotized them into believing the same thing, but when they got into the bathrooms, they believed that their pants were glued to their backs.
The audience went crazy with applause for all of the pranks, and they were all executed very well by Santos. WA’s Performing Arts Center was full of students, families, and younger students who all were very impressed by Santos’s work as I could tell by the huge roar of applause and laughter in the crowd.
The show was put on to benefit the select students who made it past the state DECA competition and will be moving onto the International Career Development Conference. The competition will take place April 30th to May 3rd in Orlando, Florida. Each student who is going was given a set of tickets they were required to sell. Once they sold enough to break even to the cost of the event, all additional ticket sales would go towards paying for their $1000 trip, said John Rogers, a marketing teacher and a WA DECA advisor.
