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Home News Chris Jones Mesmerizes Concordia Again

Photos by Austin Schafer

by Jayme Lowe

Hypnotist Chris Jones returned for the fourth time to Concordia on Oct. 21.

The show started at 8 p.m., but students were lining up at 7:30 p.m., 15 minutes before the doors opened. Jones’ performance is one of Concordia’s best-attended events of the year, as the packed auditorium of Weller could attest.

Jones uses the same basic format of his shows, but each one is different. This year at Concordia, more than 12 people were hypnotized, including returning participants seniors Jan Steinbrueck and Anne Spilker. Freshman Jon Weiss was a crowd favorite, as was sophomore Sammi Pietanza.

Jones has done 150 shows per year for the last seven years, but keeps coming back to Concordia.

“You have such good energy,” Jones said during the show.

Jones has appeared on America’s Got Talent and hails from Chicago. Throughout the performance, he inserted anecdotes of the bizarre things people have done while hypnotized.

Over the course of Friday’s two hour event, those hypnotized rode a roller coaster, slow danced with audience members, became dinosaurs and superheroes, and attended a party that got busted by the police. This year’s group was very vocal and interacted with each other, with the female participants all hugging sophomore Bethany Schilling after she broke her glasses, and several of the “superheroes” nearly got into a fight.

At the end of the show, the final suggestion left with the hypnotized participants was that Jones was actually the rapper Drake and that he had just performed a concert. Junior David Krueger was so convinced that he took a selfie with Jones, posting it on his Snapchat story with the caption: “Yo!!!!! Met Drake!!!!”

As the participants left the auditorium, they remembered everything they had done while hypnotized, and Krueger immediately fell to the floor as he recalled his actions.

 

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