Students hypnotized by weekend show

Under normal circumstances, male ballerinas, fishing and Jackie Chan's little brother do not have much in common. But they do when Tom Deluca is in town. A professional hypnotist, Deluca has been featured on MTV, CBS, and the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. He drew an enthusiastic - albeit skeptical - crowd on Sunday night in the Annenberg Center's Zellerbach Theatre. Many of the several hundred students who attended the event had seen Deluca's show at Penn last year. "He was really funny," Engineering sophomore Brian Pelloni said before the performance began, "it was the best show I had seen all year." Others attended after hearing that Deluca was "hilarious," and that he "made people look like idiots." But despite the overall exuberance of the audience, many students remained highly skeptical of the practice of hypnotism throughout the show. Several expressed disbelief before the program, saying they had friends who once had to "pretend" to be in a trance. Others said they did not believe hypnotism was possible, but that they hoped to be proven wrong. As soon as Deluca walked on the stage, the audience applauded and cheered, anxiously awaiting the hypnotic antics of their peers. "If you do not have a sense of amazement when you leave," Deluca exclaimed, "I have not done my job." The "amazement" began with several word and number tricks involving the entire audience. The response from students was lively, but it was not until 22 audience members volunteered to be hypnotized that the crowd became rowdy. After two minutes of listening to tranquil music and Deluca's monotone descriptions of a "blue dream place," all 22 participants appeared to have nodded off. Deluca then began to provoke the participants to prove their hypnotic states. Some mimed the act of fishing, while others drove new cars and ate ice cream. The crowd erupted when the participants explained why they thought they should win an imaginary body-building competition: "Because I rule," one student explained. "Because I'm sexy," said another. Although several unaffected participants left the stage throughout the show, Deluca continued to please the crowd. Particularly funny for the audience was when one hypnotized student pretended to be Bud Chan, Jackie Chan's "little brother." Audience members stood up in their seats while the entranced participant threw punches, jabs and violent threats toward the crowd. At the end of the show, the audience seemed largely pleased with Deluca's show. Skepticism, however, still abounded. College freshman Aalok Turakhia, one of the 22 participants, conceded he was "just acting" when on stage. "I'd be willing to try again," Wharton freshman Joy Dyer claimed, "Maybe [the other participants] were able to concentrate their imaginations better than I was."