He had a full evening show in the local theatre just blocks away from our hotel. I loved that show and everything about it! Men barked like dogs, women imagined that their clothes had disappeared and all manner of mayhem was unleashed twice nightly. The piece de resistance (which was not, as Mr. Heath pointed out, a French girl who struggles!) was when an audience member was suspended between two chairs while the hypnotist sat on his unsupported stomach. This feat amazed me and seemed unexplainable unless you believed in his strange and wonderful powers. Little did I know that this trick was to come back and haunt me in the years ahead. Again and again I begged my parents to take me to the show. Spoilt child that I was, again and again they obliged me. I sat in the dark and dusty auditorium enough times to realize that the members of the audience that appeared onstage were different every time and there was no sign of trickery. It appeared to me then, as I know fully believe, that it was indeed hypnosis. At the beginning of the show Mr. Heath performed a test with the entire audience to select those most susceptible to his hypnotic skills. This test involved clasping your hands together and by his persuasion being unable to unclasp them. I tried it and got suitably stuck. I dashed to the front of the theatre, but when I went onstage for the unclasping I was no sooner unstuck than I was returned to my seat. As a hypnotist, he was no idiot and the last thing he wanted was a ten-year-old boy onstage. This was my first experience with hypnosis, but in years to come another professional hypnotist would reach through the years and do more than just entertain me.
During this same vacation I also watched a movie that would be a huge influence in years to come. It wasn't so much the movie of Elmer Gantry that knocked me for a loop but the tour de force performance by Burt Lancaster in
the title role. This is a performance that isn’t afraid to ask more questions than it cares to answer. I have now included a form of faithealing in my show for nearly thirty years and each time I feel a little like Elmer Gantry doing Edwin Heath’s act. I guess since I’ve been doing it for thirty years I must like the feeling.
