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Don't be fooled
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Anonymous user Tue Nov 30, 1999 00:00:00 PST
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0 responses 0 comments On Nov. 7, students from junior high and high schools throughout Bakersfield and the surrounding area attended the Great American Smokeout conference hosted by the American Cancer Society and the Kern County Superintendent of Schools. Six students from Taft were present.
KGET Channel 17’s Robin Mangarin was moderator. She welcomed students and introduced the conference and its purpose: to reduce tobacco use.
“Young people are the key,” Mangarin commented, “to reducing tobacco use.”
 Mangarin also gave a brief biography of guest speaker Bob Fellows. Fellows is a magician and escape artist. He even recreated Houdini’s greatest escapes on the PBS show “American Experience.”
“He’s very good at what he does,” Mangarin stated before giving the stage to Fellows.
Fellows started out with an introduction of himself. He is a youth minister and performer in Minneapolis, Minn. Then he moved on to the purpose of the conference.
“This message will affect more than the students in this room,” he said. “I think most people are afraid of being trapped physically. But I think it’s more dangerous being trapped mentally.”
Fellows asked a volunteer to wrap red tape around each of his thumbs, then around both together. He then asked two more students to step through large metal rings to him.  Amazingly, they went through the tape. The ring also went through the volunteer’s arm.
“Magicians can mislead rational minds,” Fellows said.
Then he made his next point. He lifted a sign with the words “Keep Off The The Grass” written on it. The audience was surprised when Fellows pointed out the extra “the” in the sentence — no one had noticed it before.
“Advertisers use the same ideas as magicians,” Fellows stated. “Think about old movies where a soldier’s about to die and his last request is a cigarette.”
Fellows once more showed the audience his magic skills, this time in the form of mind reading. He gave two volunteers two different books and asked them to read the first word on their page of choice. He correctly identified both words: “I” and “occurred.”
His next trick was solely for one volunteer, everyone else saw how it was done. Fellows simply manipulated the situation by telling the volunteer to open and close his eyes. When his eyes were closed, Fellows would change what the situation was.
“When we don’t understand how we are being manipulated, it’s like our eyes are closed,” Fellows told the audience. “We all have emotional buttons that can be pushed to get us to do what we don’t want to do.”
Culture has been manipulated, Fellows accounted. Smoking breaks are accepted, he pointed out, but things like walking breaks would be considered odd.
“Language is important,” Fellows stressed. “We need to escape from addiction rather than giving it up.”
Fellows explained to the audience how the “high” of smoking really works. He had students imagine a line that represented the mood of a normal person. He then said that the mood of a smoker was far below it, rather than above it.
“Highs are temporary relief from withdrawal symptoms,” Fellows said.
“We need to practice being in charge of our lives before it becomes important,” suggested Fellows. He told the audience to be in charge all the time so that they will be able to be in charge when it is important.
Fellows emboldened the audience to have a new attitude about impossible things: don’t accept anything as impossible. To help visualize this, he performed Houdini’s escape attempt from a straight jacket. Fellows had two students strap him into it tightly, then attempted to undo the clasps while in the jacket. Within a few minutes, he was free.
“Don’t be fooled, take charge of your life!” Fellows encouraged.
— Lacey Chappelear is a student at Taft Union High School.

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