R-rated hypnotist show puts students in a deep sleep in Mabel Brown Room
Kim Borkowski
Equinox Staff
A group of Keene State College students let their guard down while under a rated-R hypnotist in front of a packed Mabel Brown Room last Friday.
The audience laughed and applauded as the students on stage tried shouting louder than the person next to them and used their shoes as binoculars to “watch their horse in the race.”
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Sponsored by the class of 2013, Marko, a magician and hypnotist, came to the campus last week.
He performed magic tricks in the dining commons before hypnotizing a group of students Friday night.
Marko started off by warning the audience if they didn’t want to see anything R-rated, he suggested they should probably leave.
However, he pointed out the hypnotism wouldn’t be as extreme as some may have expected.
“No clothes are going to come off, no one is going to touch each other.” Marko added, “You can do that on your own time.”
Before asking for volunteers, Marko said he had only three requirements: number one, be serious; number two, be willing to be hypnotized; and number three, be honest, don’t fake it.
After the volunteer students took their seats on stage, Marko told them, “Relax and enjoy this.”
He asked for five to six minutes of silence from the audience before he began the hypnosis by telling the volunteers that wax was slowly pouring on their heads and down their bodies.
It became clear the students on stage were falling into a deep hypnosis.
The audience began giggling when the head of each volunteer started to drop, as if they were sleeping sitting up.
In the beginning of the hypnosis, the students reacted as if they were on an extremely hot bus before it turned cold.
“I put the air conditioning on but it’s broken and I can’t turn it off,” Marko said, “The temperature is dropping…50 degrees…30 degrees…10 degrees…and 0 degrees. Use the person next to you to stay warm.” Some students began hugging the stranger sitting next to them.
Marko then asked the hypnotized to play their favorite instruments, laugh their hardest at a funny movie they’re watching, cry at a sad movie, and react to a pornographic film that their roommate was in.
Marko soon moved into the more R-rated material by telling the students they were wearing vibrating underwear.
He then chose several of the volunteers to audition for a pornographic film by pretending a chair was another person.
Tim Goss, a freshman at KSC, said after the show he thought the hypnotism was really good. “Much better than what I thought it would be,” he said.
Another freshman, Jamie Boyatsis, agreed with Goss, saying she thought the whole hypnotist show was “very entertaining.”
After the show, Sarah Phelan, a freshman, said, “It was hard to believe some of them were even hypnotized.”
Phelan added, however, after talking to her friends who were hypnotized, “It’s definitely clear that they were. They don’t remember anything.”
One of the hypnotized, Nicole Cote, a senior, said her teammates on the basketball team peer-pressured her into volunteering.
Cote said, “And to be honest, I was curious if it worked, so I gave it a shot.”
Cote said her biggest fear was embarrassing herself. She said, “I know how crazy I can be sometimes and I was really worried [Marko] would be able to bring that craziness out.” Cote concluded in saying she has no recollection of anything while hypnotized.
Marko said he was always interested in magic tricks and hypnosis as a child and began studying hypnosis in college. Marko added he’s been a hypnotist full-time since 1992.
Ali Hammell, the president of the class of 2013, said Marko came to KSC before after a previous class president recommended he come. Hammell said the previous show had a great turn out.
Hammell explained the E-Board for the junior class did a survey last semester about what they’d like to see come to Keene.
“A surprising amount of students said they’d like a hypnotist on campus,” Hammell said.
Hammell added she thinks the hypnotist show is more appealing because it is rated R.
Marko explained he never wanted to do R-rated hypnotism until he realized that it was what the colleges wanted.
“I would do my hypnotism shows at schools and they would say afterward, ‘It was great, but could you do rated R?’” he stated.
Marko added, “I wasn’t going to let that end my career.”
Sarah Phelan said she would not have come to the show if it wasn’t rated R.
Phelan said, “I thought it would be way more graphic based on what my friends told me, but I still think it was really funny.”
Another hypnotized student, Kim L’Heureux, a sophomore, said she vaguely remembers wanting to dance with the chair.
“I remember hoping he’d pick me. I was fixing my hair and wanted to use my scarf,” L’Heureux explained.
L’Heureux said despite feeling a little embarrassed, “I would do it again in a heartbeat!”
Kim Borkowski can be contacted at kborkowski@ksc.mailcruiser.com