She introduces the musician David Young, a Braco devotee who claims to channel the ghost of George Harrison. At eight bucks a head, that’s somewhere between $800 and $1200 in revenue.Ī tall, blonde woman named Angelika Whitecliff, the author of 21 Days With Braco, comes out. The ballroom is about half-full I estimate there are somewhere between a hundred and a hundred-fifty people here. I find a seat next to a woman who proceeds to pick at her teeth with her Metrocard. Three broad-shouldered, middle-aged white men stand against the wall, studying the crowd. The ballroom is large and ornate and I feel like I’ve been transported to the Overlook Hotel. I walk back down the hallway toward the Grand Ballroom and hand over my complimentary ticket. The box from which the woman removed the ticket was quite full, so potentially there could be quite a few folks who are as special as I apparently am, but the box hadn’t been readily available and seemed buried under lots of other things, so I think it’s fair to infer that I must be pretty special.) (It’s not clear how many Special Complimentary Tickets are given out. She bends down underneath the table between us, rummaging for something, popping back up occasionally to check that I am still there before coming back up with a ticket that has “complimentary” printed across it in purple block letters. As I turn, she reaches out and tells me to wait just a minute. The volunteer selling tickets looks up at me with wide eyes and asks, “Cash or credit?” I begin to pull my wallet out of my pocket before I find myself saying, “Um, actually, I need to go to an ATM? I’ll be right back.” This is a lie, because something is telling me to leave.
Most of Braco’s volunteers - wearing badges that say “Volunteer” and “Braco Gazing Event” - are women. A woman (smiling, always smiling) directs me back out the door to where tickets are being sold for eight dollars. The next session is due to take place at noon in the Grand Ballroom. It’s like being in a hall of mirrors, but with Vigo, the kind of lame villain from Ghostbusters II. I walk past a long table with lots and lots and lots of Braco-branded DVDs his face is everywhere - DVDs, books, posters. Nobody looks particularly healthy, but everyone is smiling. The crowd inside, especially on the second floor, is much the same as they are immediately outside - mostly white, mostly middle-aged. I am neither a child nor a pregnant woman, and so I bravely ventured to Midtown Manhattan on Sunday morning, where Braco was in residence at the Wyndham New Yorker hotel. Neither children nor women pregnant past their first trimester were allowed to receive his gaze. “Amazing transformations happen, and many find new power, vitality and a zest for life resulting from their experience.” His verified Facebook adds, “many report about improvements on different levels of their lives.” Braco’s followers claim that His Gaze has lifted depression, cured illness (including cancer!), and restored brain function.īraco was in New York this weekend for the summer solstice, holding hourly sessions in which he shared his Gaze from ten in the morning until six in the evening. “Braco does not teach, talk or diagnose to give treatments - he simply gazes in silence and offers his gift to visitors - independent from religion, ideology, race, color and culture,” his website states. His eyes are dark, soft and gooey, like slightly melted Tootsie Rolls, and tens of thousands of people have traveled enormous distances to be caught, if only for a moment, in their field of view. Braco is a middle-aged Croatian man with long, graying hair and a face permanently molded into a close-lipped smile.
0 kommentar(er)
