For Mother’s Day, I received tickets to see an internationally renowned psychic-comedian at the DC Improv Dinner Club. What totally charms me about this gift is that the givers knew I would love it.
From Britain’s West End, Peter Antoniou has performed for royalty, headlined in Las Vegas, and hosted America’s Got Talent—with celebrities like Sofia Vergara saying, “There’s no way you could have known that. You’re amazing.”
So the question was, what exactly is Peter Antoniou’s talent? He’s undeniably funny and can ad-lib on a dime. He studied with psychologists, profilers, hypnotists, and magicians, which obviously means he studied extensively how our brains work and how to manipulate them. Cool.
I have vast respect for the entertainment skills of mentalists and professional magicians and sometimes go home to look up how they did a trick on the internet.
But in my experience, there are also highly intuitive people in this world with honed extrasensory abilities that make a performance like this one even more fun. My mantra: You don’t know what you don’t know, a humble prerequisite to discovery.
Driving into DC, my GPS goes from helpful to perverse, sending me not to the theater but past it, around the block again and again. I can almost hear it laughing. But of course, I don’t believe it thinks thoughts, right?
I turn it off, find a parking space directly in front of the club, and get shown to my table, where two other women are already seated. Donna and Roberta. We shake hands, they pass over the drinks and dinner menu, and though I didn’t love the idea of sitting with strangers, I am immediately comfortable with them. Like I’m the third girlfriend — which is a phenomenon I forget to trust and am privileged to believe.
Most people are nice.
During the performance, audience members are called up on stage randomly. Our method of selection? Anyone who catches one of 5 frisbees tossed into the crowd simultaneously. No audience plants possible.
We are all willing to make fools of ourselves, to suspend our belief that reality is limited to what we see in four dimensions. As secrets are exposed and private dreams made public, we laugh together in awed delight.
I have been called up on stage twice at shows like this, so I empathize with the squeamish who instinctively caught the frisbees like bridal bouquets. I was once asked to sit on the left side of the stage, blindfolded and facing the audience, while another woman was seated similarly on the right side of the stage. It had snowed that evening, and the audience was sparse. We were in a very utilitarian all-purpose room at a community center near Baltimore. I had gone alone, emboldened by my GPS!
The other woman and I were perhaps 25 yards apart. The entertainer told the audience that he would touch each of us twice with a feather while explaining the theory of quantum entanglement. He told my blindfolded compatriot and me to raise our right hands when we felt his touch.
Although physicists would cringe at this interpretation, I listened as he referenced the theory in quantum physics that says two things once in proximity are forever connected and what happens to one will affect the other simultaneously.
He walked around the stage while he talked, but I couldn’t tell where he was unless he was standing right next to me. After a minute or so, I felt the sweep of the feather, quite distinctly, against my shoulder. I raised my hand. He kept talking, and his voice moved behind and around me; a minute later, I felt the feather brush my cheek. Again, I raised my hand.
He wound up his speech to robust applause and had us each take off our blindfolds to face a grinning audience. I looked over at my fellow volunteer on the other side of the stage and smiled. She shrugged and smiled back as puzzled as I was at the applause and laughter.
The performer thanked us both for our participation and ushered us off stage. The room was a bit cold, and a man in a forest green ski jacket leaned over when I sat down and said, “Want to know why we’re laughing?”
He held out his cell phone where he had videotaped the show, and I stared at the screen trying to make sense of what I saw. There I sat, blindfolded. And there on the far side of the stage sat the other volunteer. The entertainer paced the stage, and suddenly I saw why people had laughed.
The two times I had distinctly felt the brush of the feather against my shoulder and cheek; the two times I had raised my hand with happy confidence…
He had been touching her.
I put on my jacket and looked around for my scarf. This had been a trick, a sleight of hand, an illusion, and yet. Something in me had been touched. How connected are we, I wondered as I walked to my car.
I tell writers, “Don’t tell me what it meant. Tell me what it felt like.”
I drove home through snowflakes falling like feathers. I don’t know what it meant but I know how it felt.
Like magic.
