About 15 students "swam like a fishy" Tuesday night on stage in the Convocation Center Auditorium at Arkansas State University. They also "petted the little birdies" on their fingers and "cuddled their shoes like puppies and kittens."These students weren't crazy or on any sort of medicine; they were hypnotized by ONE LIFE TO LIVE star Catherine Hickland and world-renowned hypnotist John Cerbone.
Hickland made her debut as a stage hypnotist at 7 p.m. Tuesday during a hypnosis show put on by the College of Business for ASU's Global Entrepreneurship Week. After training and doing clinical hypnosis for the past two years, this was Hickland's first time to do a hypnosis entertainment show for an audience.
"I have been doing clinical hypnosis, but stage hypnosis is another whole thing," Hickland said. "So this is my first stage show, getting broken in easy."
Hickland said she first became interested in hypnotism at 18 when she saw Pat Collins, the "hip hypnotist."
"I just remember thinking that some day I wanted to understand this art and this science of the mind because I do think that the combination of body, mind and spirit is about the most powerful thing in the whole world," Hickland said.
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However, a busy acting and entrepreneurial career prevented her from pursuing the art until recently. Since 1998 Hickland has starred on ONE LIFE TO LIVE, where she plays Lindsay Rappaport. She has also appeared in numerous movies, acted on Broadway and runs her own cosmetic line, Cat Cosmetics.
In the show Tuesday, Cerbone and Hickland invited volunteers up on stage to take part in the hypnosis. They then entranced the volunteers into a deep sleep-like state, in which they appeared extremely relaxed. Many of the volunteers, who were sitting in a row across the stage, started leaning on one another and falling over in their chairs.
Throughout the evening, Cerbone and Hickland made the hypnotized volunteers do all kinds of wild deeds. From dancing like Britney Spears to arguing in Japanese, those hypnotized gave the audience a good laugh.
Whitney Jones, a sophomore radiology major from Jacksonville, was among those hypnotized.
"It was a different experience," she said. "I just felt weird kind of because I didn't really think that hypnosis worked, but after experiencing it, I guess I was proven wrong."
"I've heard about hypnosis and everything and I really thought it was fake until I saw it first hand. It just seemed too real to be fake," Katelyn Brown, a sophomore radio-tv major from Morrilton, said.
While most the volunteers performed every action called out during the two-hour show, a few did not. One volunteer walked off stage, and two were quietly told to leave when they didn't perform any of the actions.
As the key-note speaker for Global Entrepreneurship Week, Hickland also spoke Monday at noon in the Student Union Auditorium about her entrepreneurial experiences, including the launch of Cat Cosmetics in 2001, which is now a booming Madison Avenue business.
Though she lives in New York City, and has for the last 17 years, Hickland is no stranger to Jonesboro. She is involved with the local Cardiology Associates and Red Dress events, which fight against heart disease, and comes to town about six times per year.
"I've, in the process, made a lot of friends here and consider it a second home," Hickland said. "I always come here when I want to relax and when I want to get a taste of real people and get away from the entertainment world."
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