Last week I wrote about the unlikelihood of me performing storytelling or standup while naked. Then it occurred to me:
I’ve already been naked onstage once before.
I had forgotten.
Here is the story:
I am quite susceptible to hypnosis. This trait may run in the family. My mother, a smoker for more than twenty-five years, quit immediately after one hypnosis session and never smoked again.
I discovered my susceptibility to hypnosis after attending hypnosis shows twice in my life. Both times I had been brought on stage, successfully placed under hypnosis, and made to be a major part of the show.
The first time was in 1990. Frank Santos, a well-known comic and hypnosis expert, was performing in a nightclub in Attleboro, Massachusetts. I took my girlfriend, Kelly, to the show, unaware that I would soon become the main attraction.
When Santos asked for volunteers, I approached the stage. I had no idea if I was capable of being hypnotized, and honestly, I doubled its legitimacy, 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.
I’ve always been the kind of person who will trust-fall into anyone’s arms.
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 I was Mick Jagger and asked me to perform Satisfaction for the audience. The DJ played a karaoke version, 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 on I-295 in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, and the song came on the radio. Like a ton of bricks, the entire recollection dumped into my head, forcing me to pull into a rest area to regain my composer.
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 to save myself.
A peek at my true colors, perhaps. My unrelenting survival instinct. I don’t remember this at all. Kelly told me about it later.
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 was added to the moment. A vague memory of this came back to me several nights later while kissing my girlfriend. Again, like a ton of bricks landing on my head, I felt I had secretly cheated on her.
I recall panicking for a second before I grasped the reality of the situation.
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 needed to save the world.
Santos later said, “In all my years of doing this, every volunteer has taken that costume from me and run to the restroom.”
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 I was fully naked onstage for at least ten seconds before finally pulling the outfit 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 his 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 later recalled saving a woman from an imaginary safe falling on her head and jumping over an electrified fence to rescue her from a pit of snakes.
Kelly told me that I lifted the woman right out of her seat and carried her across the room before depositing her on a table, but I don’t remember this at all.
I also have no recollection of my moment of nakedness onstage.
There were many other things that I was asked to do that night, but I never remembered them in any 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.
I’m not sure if I’m happy that there were no mobile phones in 1990 or not. Part of me wishes for a recording of that night to see what I can only vaguely remember, but another part is happy that those memories are lost to time.
Years later, in the summer of 1995, I would be hypnotized onstage again at the Eastern States Exposition, and this time the show was recorded. Once again, I became the featured attraction. Though I have little memory of that show, I purchased the videotape to see precisely what happened onstage.
It was uncomfortable to watch. It was like watching someone who had taken over my body. Though my friends watched the recording and cackled at my antics, I was forced to leave the room while it played.
I couldn’t stand watching it.
Frank Santos died in 2009. His son, Frank Santos, Jr., is a hypnotist who, like his father, now performs clinical hypnosis and a brand of R-rated comedy as his father once did in New England.
He will be performing on July 21 at Rosalini’s in Pawcatuck, CT.
I’ll be out of town that day.
