Twenty-three years into my career as a stand-up comedian and television comedy writer, a colleague recommended I go see his cousin, one of America's top mentalists (aka mind readers), perform in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City.
Back then, in 2002, I did not know exactly what a mentalist was. But the performance changed my life.
The mentalist asked my wife at the time and another woman — someone we did not know — to get up from the audience, to stand about 8 feet apart in the performance area, and to close their eyes. He silently touched the woman with a feather,
