When I was in my 20s, selling out was a hot topic of conversation among us young writers, journalists, filmmakers, musicians, and such. Twenty years later I was making car commercials. You’da thought I could’nt sink any lower.
So now here I was in charge of a big-budget, multicamera, totally bullshit TV production designed to get morons to spend money they don’t have to hear bogus advice from telephone “psychics” whose job is is to keep them on the phone as long as possible.
It all started when a poet friend and I decided we wanted to go into the 900-number psychic business. He had worked at a psychic hotline just prior to his detox. We were both broke and, I mean, how hard could it be to fool people who believe in this stuff?
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Kathy had done car commercials and pitched other similarly high-class businesses on TV. She had a short acting ing career that flopped–small parts in a couple of TV movies. All along she had been an astrologer, doing charts for money. In her late 30s or early 40s, tall with short frosted blond hair, glamorous from across the room, she was severe but ingratiating, full of treacly new-age insincerity. She thought she had hit it big when she did a 900-number psychic infomercial for Mike Lasky aka Mike Warren, who had made a lot of money as a gambling tout. Her informercial was a big hit. Suckers were calling by the thousands, but she felt she wasn’t slurping enough from the trough, so she quit. Lasky went on to make those hilarious Psychic Friends Network shows with Dionne Warwick and Rip Taylor. Kathy put together her own bunch of fortunetellers, and called the group the International Foundation of Professional Psychic Counselors. She wanted it to sound like they were therapists.
I laughed. Not in front of Kathy, however.
And you’re providing the people getting the readings? Natch. And they’ll already know the psychics? Yeah.
Kathy: Who’s ready for a reading?
