By LINDA KELLETT

C-S-E News Staff

NELLISTON — It’s all in the way you word the question.

Such was the case Saturday night when stage hypnotist Jack Hirsh asked members of the good-sized crowd at the Canajoharie-Fort Plain Elks Lodge who would like to be on stage with him.

Two people rather timidly responded to his query.

Rephrasing the question, he asked: “By round of applause, who came to see the person next to them be hypnotized tonight?”

There wasn’t an unclapped hand in the house.

Such was the beginning of what proved to be a skillful, laughter-filled performance in the Earl Fredericks Room at the local lodge that featured gaffes and hijinks — and it was all for a good cause, as the event served as a fundraiser for the local organization.

Hirsh noted that he couldn’t hypnotize anyone against their will, and he promised to leave volunteers with positive suggestions to make their lives better.

Additionally, prior to the start of the performance, he said participants would become more animated, but he wouldn’t ask them to do anything he wouldn’t do either.

With those ground rules established, the stage hypnotist successfully induced a hypnotic state in six volunteers, who provided about an hour’s worth of entertainment for the roughly seven dozen people in attendance.

Hirsh told one participant that he had great thirst but would be unable to find his mouth with the water bottle.

He suggested that another participant would feel a pinch and suspect the person next to her had done it every time Hirsh shook her hand.

Yet another volunteer danced to the imagined soundtrack of the 1970s hit, “Saturday Night Fever.”

The participants shouted, danced, and even played imaginary instruments.

One of the volunteers thought he was wearing X-ray glasses that made it possible to see through things, while another was told the lodge’s trophy elk could talk to him.

All thought green napkins were money when it was suggested to them, and they tried to hoard it.

At the end of the program, Hirsh suggested that his subjects “think about change you want to make in your life. Anything you put your mind to, you can achieve” and brought them out of their hypnotic states.

Following the program, several participants were asked for their reactions to the experience.

Darcie Lee, of Canajoharie, said, “It was really weird. I could hear people talking, but I couldn’t wake up.”

New Hartford resident Michael Emmerich, who at the end was instructed to slap his thigh and shout, “Who’s your daddy” every time a reference was made to Hirsh’s show, said, “I know what I’m saying, but I don’t know why I’m saying it.”

Additionally, he noted that remembered the beginning of the induction, but he had no recollection of the rest of the program.