Photos by Danika Worthington
Fifteen ASU students are slumped in a row of seats across the front of the room, chin to collarbone. At a moment’s notice they’re leaned back, left arms up, bouncing in their imaginary low-riders and grinning as they speed, completely still, down invisible streets.
One girl forgets her name and sings “Happy Birthday” to herself to remember. Another whimpers as, in her mind, her tongue grows so long it falls from her mouth into her hands.
The man behind the curtain is Michael DeSchalit, professional stage hypnotist, magician, hypnotherapist and motivational speaker. He walks the stage with a confident air, making jokes, occasionally turning to the full room of students in the audience to remind them of the power of imagination.
DeSchalit is stocky, brown hair spiked with golden tips, wearing a pair of loafers with crosses embroidered on the tops, jeans and a gray blazer over a blue plaid shirt. He has a penchant for jokes and loves his craft almost as much as he loves entertaining others.
“People need an escape,” DeSchalit said. “I can help people laugh. That’s it for me. That’s the payday.”
He was a magician before he was a stage hypnotist — as a young boy, he was enchanted by the magicians he went to see. He remembered himself, a little kid, leaning forward on the balcony at the Tucson Convention Center, watching Harry Blackstone Jr. make a birdcage disappear, DeSchalit with his hands raised high to volunteer to help.
And then there was David Copperfield on television.
“I would get irritated when he fooled me with tricks,” DeSchalit said. “I wanted to learn how they worked.”
He started learning magic at 8 years old. With little he could do so young, he gave up, grew up and went to college. Eighteen years later, he bought a magic trick. Then he started taking classes. Then he became a professional.
“It became an obsession to an addiction,” DeSchalit said. “I bought a $10 trick and was hooked. It was crazy.”
He traveled to Las Vegas to learn stage hypnosis after buying a 350-pound magic trick. As he was waiting in the driveway to get help carrying it into his house, he found a publication about magic in his mailbox: “Magicians — Are You Tired of Carrying Heavy Magic Tricks Around?” All he had to do was learn the secrets of stage hypnotism.
So he went to Vegas.
At first he was a skeptic, DeSchalit said. “I was a magician first … I thought, ‘There must be a trick to this.’”
At the stage hypnosis seminar, he listened to a lecture from the “father of stage hypnosis,” Ormond McGill. When McGill began to send audience members into the hypnotic trance, DeSchalit, in all his skepticism, thought he’d play along. He felt relaxed for a little while. Then he woke up.
“I thought, ‘What a good way to spend five minutes at the beginning of the seminar,’” DeSchalit said. “And I looked at my watch, and it had been 45 minutes.”
Putting people into the hypnotic trance, which is called induction, is DeSchalit’s favorite part of being a stage hypnotist, he said. His least favorite part is dealing with audio equipment — he has his own heavy system that he brings along and has to set up before shows.
“He drives from Phoenix, Ariz., to Las Vegas … and brings all the equipment with him,” said Jerry Valley, DeSchalit’s mentor and an established stage hypnotist. “I mean, he’s a workhorse.”
DeSchalit also travels a lot, which he enjoys, though he said it can be lonely.
“You make friends while you’re on stage, but they go away when the show’s over,” he said. “If they stay, that’s called stalking.”
DeSchalit said he looks forward to when both his daughters are established in college and he can travel with his wife. As a father, he said, being a stage hypnotist has helped him remember how much power words and suggestions have.
“It just makes me more aware as a parent on watching my daughters grow and learn,” DeSchalit said. “I know that the words I use on them can either influence them or tear them down.”
Kinesiology freshman Davon Martin comes off the stage with little memory of anything he did. His face lights up as, from moment to moment, more comes back to him.
“I remember a car,” he says, nodding. His face slowly splits into a grin. “I was rollin’!” His friends are around him now, congratulating him, laughing, and there are tears of laughter running from Martin’s eyes.
Hypnotherapy and motivational speaking have the same passion behind them as stage hypnosis and magic do for DeSchalit — whether through bringing laughter or success in achieving goals, his overall mission, he said, is to help others.
“I take life seriously,” DeSchalit said. “As long as I can have fun doing it.”
Contact the reporter at molly.bilker@asu.edu.
