Sept. 18: Light as a feather

 In one of my old magic books, there was a sort of party game/social experiment/seance that you could do called "Light as a feather." The idea was to get one person to sit in a chair while four other people positioned themselves around them. The four standing people were then to clasp their hands together but keep their index fingers erect and touching each other. They were to place those fingers under the seated person's armpits or knees and try to lift them into the air. Usually, it was difficult to pull this off.

Following that failure, the four were to place their hands on the seated person's head and say "This person is as light as a feather" five times. Then they would repeat the experiment and this time, the person could be lifted easily.

It sounded like nonsense but it also intrigued the hell out of me. I wanted to see if it worked but I didn't have four friends I could invite over at that particular time. For now, it would have to be relegated to the "someday I will..." section of my mind.

Fast forward to Grade 7 and our English teacher wants us to deliver speeches on things that interest us. I decided to do mine on "the unexplained." I'd been studying magic for three years and, in that time, had absorbed, through osmosis, a few anecdotes of unexplained phenomenon. So I wrote a speech and I delivered and it fell flat; something else seemed needed. I recalled that old light as a feather experiment and decided the front of my English classroom might be the ideal venue to give it the college try.

There was a kid in my class named Shamus, who was of slight stature, who I thought would be the ideal candidate to sit in the chair. But Shamus wanted nothing to do with it and another classmate, Justin*, volunteered to take his place. So I had four of my fellow 12-year-olds surround him, try to lift him, no avail. After going through the "light as a feather" ritual, however, they easily hoisted Justin into the air. The whole class gasped, but no one was as astonished as I was.

"Son of a gun," I thought. "That thing worked."

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I spent much of that day frightened that I had commit a mortal sin. Somehow, those four words had invoked a demon at St. Stephen's.**

But there was science involved. All I was doing was framing my classmates, even though I didn't know I was framing them.

On the first attempt, my classmates were working erratically, trying to lift a 120 pound human being with only their fingers. So when they put their hands on Justin's head and went through the Light as a Feather ritual, what I was actually doing was grounding them, getting them to lift as a team. "One two three lift," I would say and that was an instruction to not just lift but lift together as a group.

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I don't think I have done the "light as a feather" experiment since that fateful day in 1985. Come to think of it, it might be a welcome addition to the Perception vs Reality show that I perform in schools.

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*Justin, do you remember this?

**Fun fact: Before I arrived at St. Stephen's, the name of the school's sporting teams was the St. Stephen's Demons. Evidently, someone on the Parent Teacher Council thought that name inappropriate for a Catholic school and so the name was changed to the St. Stephen's Super Sonics. (I remember being in favour of that move.) Today, the school's teams are called the St. Stephen's Stingers.