Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 632

I was naked onstage

I am quite susceptible to hypnosis.  This trait may run in the family.  My mother, a smoker for more than twenty-five years, quit cold turkey after one hypnosis session.   

I discovered my perchance for hypnosis after attending hypnosis shows twice in my life.  Both times I have been brought on stage, successfully placed under hypnosis and made to be a major part of the show. 

The first time was in 1990.  The late Frank Santos, well known comic and hypnosis expert, was performing in a nightclub in Attleboro, MA.  I took my girlfriend, Kelly, to the show, unaware that I would soon become main attraction. 

When Santos asked for volunteers, I approached the stage.  I had no idea if I was capable of being hypnotized, but I wanted to give it a shot.  Santos performed a series of quick tests on each prospective volunteer, including a trust-fall, and I passed.  He asked me to assume a seat on the stage. 

This is the last thing that I definitively remember.  Everything from here on consists of memories that came back to me well after the show, in addition to what Santos, my girlfriend, and the audience members would later tell me.

I was hypnotized almost immediately.  As volunteers failed to become hypnotized or quickly fell out of hypnosis, our ranks were thinned until four of us remained on the stage for the majority of the show. 

In no specific order, I was told to do the following things onstage:

Santos told me that I was Mick Jagger and told me to perform Satisfaction for the audience.  The DJ played a karaoke version of the song and I performed the entire song, singing and dancing and doing my best Jagger impression.  This memory, and the absolute belief that I was Mick Jagger, returned months later when I was driving in my car and the song came on the radio.  Like a ton of bricks, the entire recollection dumped into my head, forcing me to pull over.

In a way I cannot describe, I truly believed that I was Mick Jagger, and in my memory, the audience loved me. 

I was told that the floor was quicksand and that I was sinking.  I quickly grabbed the guy sitting next to me, forcing him to the ground and climbing atop him in order to save myself. 

I peek at my true colors, perhaps.  My unrelenting survival instinct.  I don't remember this at all.

With the permission of my girlfriend, I was told to make out with the hypnotized girl sitting next to me.  Apparently this went on for some time, and other, more colorful action were added to the moment.  A vague memory of this came back to me several nights later after kissing my girlfriend, and I remember that my initial thought was that I had secretly cheated on her.

I recall panicking for a second before the reality of the situation reached me.    

But the moment that was remembered most was when Santos handed me a one-piece, unitard-like Superman costume and asked me to put it on.  He told me that I was Superman and that I needed to save the world.

Santos later told me, "In all my years of doing this, every volunteer has taken that costume and run to the men's room."

I did not.  Santos turned his back, thinking I had left the stage, and began working with another volunteer.  As he did, I removed all of my clothing and donned the costume.  My girlfriend later told me that I was fully naked onstage for at least ten seconds before finally managing to pulling the costume up my legs and over my waist.

When Santos finally turned back and saw the pile of clothing and my half-naked body, he realized that he had made a mistake.  But with no way to correct it, and unaware until after the show of how exposed I had really been, we went on with the show.  In my red and blue unitard, I proceeded to save several women in the audience from imaginary disasters before he specifically told me to go to the men's room to change back into my regular clothing. 

I can recall saving a woman from an imaginary safe falling on her head (though in my memory the safe is real and incredibly heavy) and jumping over an electrified fence in order to rescue a woman from a pit of snakes (apparently I lifted her right out of her seat and carried her across the room, finally depositing her on a table).

Thankfully, I do not recall my moment of nakedness onstage.

There were many other things that I was asked to do that night, but these were the ones that I am able to recall in some way.  Needless to say I did not pay for a single drink for the rest of the night and was patted on the back and thanked effusively by the audience members who remained after the show to drink and dance. 

Years later I would be hypnotized onstage again at the Eastern States Exposition, and this time the show was videotaped.  Once again I became the featured attraction, and though I have little memory of that show, I purchased the videotape to see exactly what happened onstage.

It was uncomfortable to watch, like watching someone who had taken over my body.  Though my friends have watched the tape and laughed at my antics, I can no longer be in the same room while it is playing, and I have tucked it safely away lest  someone accidentally find it and slip it into one of a the few VCRs still functioning.

Perhaps I should just burn it. 

Nothing like an ominous hammer cock

I watch a lot of partial movies on AMC while I am working out.  Depending on the elliptical machine, I often have closed captioning automatically turned on for the film.

It turns out that the captioning can be quite amusing, particularly when it comes to captioning the sounds in a movie.

How a deaf person is supposed to interpret the description of a sound that he or she has never heard before is beyond my understanding, but the descriptions are still fun and often provide an additional level of entertainment to the film. 

While watching a western this week, I saw the following captions:

Sonorous beer fizzing, used just prior to a gunfight

Frisking about, which was used to describe the unseen activity taking place in the saloon below the protagonist's bedroom

How drinking, gambling, shouting and piano playing became frisking about is also beyond my comprehension.

Ominous hammer cock, which described the thumbing back of the hammer on a pistol prior to firing, though the description certainly allows for a variety of interpretations.  

Dating in Stop Shop

When I was in high school, I would take girls to the local Stop & Shop on a first date. 

When I told this to my wife, she asked what I would do on these dates. 

A reasonable question, but I didn't have much of an answer.

It was never anything terribly special.  We would walk the aisles, fill a shopping cart with the most incongruous items, debate the best apple of the bushel, write on the fogged glass in the frozen foods aisle,  hide eggs in random places around the store, reorganize the cereal aisle and buy a meal that could be eaten in the parking lot. 

I know.  It sounds kind of ridiculous, but on the half a dozen occasions that I employed this strategy, it worked well. 

"I just took girls around the store and made them laugh," I told Elysha. 

"So you took your show on the road," she said. 

Exactly.  I took my show on the road. 

And surprisingly the dates were always a lot of fun.

Then my wife said one of the nicest things that she has ever said to me.

"I'm not surprised," she said.  "You have a lot of play."

I can die a happy man. 

US Weekly a mystery to me

This was the magazine cover that I was staring at yesterday while waiting in line at the supermarket. 

Here's the good news:

I did not recognize the woman on the front cover who was "obsessed with being thin" (though I suspect that she might not actually be a celebrity). 

I learned that someone named Kim is in love and wants "his baby", but I do not know who Kim is and do not know whose baby she wants.

Ashley and Pete have apparently been torn apart, but I do not know who Ashley or Pete are (though both look happy about their recent breakup/divorce).   

LC and Whitney are in a jealous feud, but I do not recognize either person.  Sisters, perhaps?

I assume that the lack of last names means that Kim, Ashley, Pete, LC and Whitney are considered household names.

But not for me. 

Once again, I find myself a little nervous about my deteriorating level of pop culture capital.

But I also can't help but think that the time that I could have spent getting to know about Kim's love life or LC and Whitney's feud was better spent on the writing and reading and playing with my daughter that undoubtedly filled my time.

In fact, I suspect that I was probably better off clipping my toenails, twiddling my thumbs and staring at the ceiling rather than learning about the intricacies of Pete and Ashley's relationship.  

Honestly, am I missing anything at all?

I cant die at my desk unnoticed. Oh well.

Teaching isn't the easiest or the best paying job, but I have always wanted to teach and am happy that I chose this profession.  In addition to the daily joys that it brings, I have found some of my best friends through teaching.  Colleagues, the parents of students and even former students, now all grown up, have become some of the most important people in my life. 

I had no idea that teaching would fill my life with so many extraordinary people. 

And there's the added bonus that if I were to ever die on the job, one of my two dozen students would undoubtedly notice my corpse before long.

They are observant that way. 

Not so for Rebecca Wells, a 51-year-old Department of Internal Services worker who died in her cubicle on Friday, February 16 in Los Angeles County and went unnoticed until the following day.

There may be days when I wish the kids mistook me for dead and just left me alone for a few minutes, but this is taking that desire to an extreme. 

 

When your country is one thousand years old, things can get quite complicated

With the sale of my new book to a British publisher, I felt it was time to finally understand one of the great mysteries of life:

United Kingdom versus Great Britain versus England: What's the difference?

And where in hell does Canada and the Falkland Islands fit?

Techno-toddler

My two-year old daughter, who cannot pronounce the letter L in the word please and is not potty trained, picked up my wife's iPhone and brought it over to the shower door.  She held it up to my wife, who was taking a shower, and said, "Animals."

"Alright, my wife said.  "If you can find your animals, you can play with it."

Clara pressed the button at the bottom of the phone to turn it on, swiped the "slide to unlock" bar, exited the app that my wife was using, swiped two screens over, located her "Animal" app, pressed it, and began playing.

The girl still sleeps in a crib, sucks her thumb, and cannot negotiate stairs.  And we don't even allow her to use the iPhone very often.  She usually plays with her apps while we clip her toenails, change her diaper, or when she loses her mind in a restaurant. 

Much of what she has learned has simply been by watching us.

Which is why I was not surprised to learn that a survey of online mothers found that more small children can play a computer game than ride a bike.  In addition, only 20 percent can "swim unaided," 11 percent can tie their shoelaces without help, and 20 percent know how to make an emergency phone call.

I know that I was not allowed to leave kindergarten without the shoe tying and emergency phone call skills mastered.  Mrs. Carroll would take us out of Mrs. Dubois's kindergarten classroom and test us until we passed.

I recall the process being quite stressful, at least for me. 

So we'll get around to the swimming and bike riding and shoe tying in all good time, but for now, I think her ability to navigate the iPhone is quite impressive.

And a little frightening.

This aint my childhood library

When I was a kid, my local library did not look like this:

   

Since when did libraries become equipped with germ-laden toys for children to fight over while their parents nervously attempt to negotiate the delicate balance between encouraging sharing and allowing an ill-mannered ruffian to run roughshod over their kids' rights to the plastic waffle maker?

I'm not complaining.  As you can see, my daughter loves the place.  I'm just wondering when and why this decision was made.

Did some big picture guy say, "Hey, let's get kids thinking that this is a great place at an early age, so as they get older, the library will feel like home."

I hope this is not the reason.  This rationale never works.  It's a nice thought until the toddlers become surely, cynical, antiestablishment, opinionated, highly discriminating teenagers.

Then all those times spent playing with the Little People castle and cooking in the Fisher Price microwave will mean nothing.     

A good rule of thumb: If you cannot appeal to your customer's actual age group and must instead rely upon nostalgia to keep them coming back, you're in trouble.

But whatever the reason for the toys and games and puppet stage, Clara loves the place, and I'm glad.  It's much more attractive than the library of my youth, a dimly-lit, one room library in the basement of the Town Hall containing (if memory serves me) a total of six long library shelves of books. 

Compared to that place, the West Hartford Public Library is Disneyworld on steroids.  

And eventually my daughter will realize that the building is filled with books, too.  My books, even. 

Right?

Perspective

I was complaining about my house yesterday.  The first floor windows are dreadful and in serious need of replacement. 

It was so cold in my office that I can see my breath. 

Then I was reminded that I grew up in a six-room, one-bathroom house with four brothers and sisters.  

Until I moved into my unheated bedroom in the basement when I was twelve, I shared a room with my brother, Jeremy, and my step-brother, Ian.  Ian slept on a mattress that we shoved under my bed every morning so it wouldn't be in the way.

And I only moved into the basement after my parents went away for the weekend, leaving us in the charge of my evil stepfather's mother, who was less than observant on many matters.  While she watched television in the living room, my brothers and I moved my bedroom furniture into the basement without her ever noticing. 

In fact, it took my parents three days to even realize that I have moved into the basement, and only then after noticing me come through the basement door one morning to use the bathroom. 

"If you're willing to freeze, you can stay down there," my mother said.

During the winter, I slept in long underwear and had to pile no less than six blankets on top of me just to stay warm. 

How dare I complain about those office windows.  

Every boy loves Nessie

As a boy, I will be extremely upset if incontrovertible evidence of the Loch Ness Monster is unearthed after I die.

Every boy on the planet wants the Loch Ness Monster to be real. 

The latest string of Nessie sightings, including this new photo, only serves to frustrate me more. 

Is it never sunny at a loch? 

This is why I have no intention of dying. 

At least until all the Scottish lochs are drained or a plesiosaur-like creature is pulled from the water by a local fisherman.