January 5, 2009

• My First Professional Gig

  I never set out to become a professional psychic.  I had no desire to gain fame as a Tarot card reader.  It just seemed like a good idea at the time.

  The time was the summer of 1976.  Alaska, which had always had a boom-and-bust economy, was enduring a severe bust following the construction boom of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.  Charley and I had both been out of work for over a year, well beyond the end of our unemployment compensation.

  We made the rounds of Anchorage dumpsters as often as we had enough money to buy fuel for our VW bug.  We could reliably find out-of-date bread, eggs, and dairy products behind the Carr’s store nearest us, and even nearer to home was a Bi-Lo that left discarded meat in a barrel outside the back door.  Most of its beneficiaries were dog teams, but we did not hesitate to grab for ourselves a pork loin or shoulder of beef if it was only green on one end.  In summer, vegies came from my garden and from wildforaging in the woods.  In winter, greens came from the sourdough’s standby:  alfalfa and clover sprouts.

  Various other dumpsters provided us with just about any kind of mongo, small and large.  If it was too large for our bug, we’d get our neighbor Marty, who was a scavenger of longstanding and large scale.  He’d drive his truck to help us pick up construction debris, empty barrels, etc.  If we didn’t have a need for the stuff, we’d sell it at the flea markets held in Anchorage’s Sports Arena one weekend a month.  Organized recycling, at the time, was unknown in Anchorage.

  Each morning, Charley went for coffee at Denny’s, where contractors gathered for breakfast.  He was hoping for steady construction work, but that didn’t come.  Mostly he just learned where there were jobsites we could clean up for the scrap.  Occasionally, he’d pick up some temp work, too.  One day he came home with a small ad torn from a newspaper.  He was grinning when he showed it to me.

  The heading read:  “CALL FOR VENDORS & PERFORMERS!“  They were looking for participants for the first Girdwood Forest Fair.  They wanted artists and artisans, musicians, singers, dancers, actors, jugglers, acrobats, magicians and fortunetellers.  I told Charley, “I’m not a fortuneteller!”  He said, “I know that, but they don’t.”  It was an old topic of discussion, and it came up almost every time my cards came out at a party. That was whenever I could find someone willing to let me read for them. 

  I was a true amateur, a lover of the art.  A shy loner like many other only children, in reading cards I found an ideal ice breaker.  Never able to bring myself to engage in small talk and ask the innocuous personal questions that lubricate social interaction between strangers, I was enabled by the cards to tell people things about themselves that they had been sure nobody else knew.  A thousand times, at least, in the seven years that I had been practicing, I had said, “Fortunetellers tell people what they want to hear.  I tell you what you need to know.”

  It took Charley a few minutes to convince me.  The booth fee was $30.00, and it was forty miles or so to Girdwood.  I was afraid we wouldn’t make back our expenses.  He insisted that it was worth a shot.  Over our years together, to my everlasting benefit, Charley convinced me that a lot of things would be worth a shot.

  I got on the phone and made the commitment to be there on the Friday before July 4th to set up a booth for the weekend.  The festival, I was told, would be held in the park behind the village fire hall in Girdwood.  I knew the place because we had camped in the park and had gotten water from the outdoor faucet at the fire hall.  We already had a “booth.”  It was a collection of salvaged lumber and reused nails that we had been using for our flea market booth.

  On the day, we were among the first to arrive.  Three other groups of people were scattered around among the trees, hammering away at booths.  Another bunch of guys, supervised by a young woman, were setting up a flat bed trailer to be used as a stage.  I picked a spot with some reasonably flat ground between the tree roots.

  Charley and I put together our eight-foot square frame easily and quickly after months of practice.  We covered the walls with India print bedspreads and the top with poly sheeting.  The furniture was a piece of scrap plywood laid across an old fruit crate for the table, and floor cushions for seating.  When construction was done, we wandered around, lent a hand with some other boothies, and got acquainted.

  Saturday morning, I sat there on my pillow and watched two young women in a kissing booth across the way, making money as fast as they could kiss, at two bucks a pop.  There were a dozen or more booths, most of them crafters or artists.  Most of those people would become my friends within a year or two, but I never saw the kissing girls again, except once at a laundromat when one of them called me a bitch, but that’s another story.

  The morning passed in idleness for me.  A few people passed by and asked Charley, my doorkeeper and body guard, how much I charged.  He explained that I followed a tradition of not setting a price on my readings, but would accept donations.  It was an awkward spiel and he soon condensed it to, “Whatever you think it’s worth after you hear it.”

  I did my first reading in early afternoon when someone came in to get out of a sudden rain shower and felt awkward about just standing there under my roof.  My reading blew his mind and he went away and talked about it.  Business picked up.  I was there that evening long after the kissers got too drunk to stand there any longer.  Charley had to send a couple away when the light grew too dim for me to read the cards.  The next day, there were people waiting for me when I crawled out of my sleeping bag.

  There were people waiting to get into my booth all day Sunday.  Charley dragged over some straw bales from around the stage for them to rest on, and spent his time entertaining them or luring in others by telling them, sincerely, how good I was at what I did.  He’d been watching over my shoulder and listening in for a few years, and the cards had blown his socks off a few times.  If someone hesitated, he’d say, “It’s painless.”

  Other boothies found time to come over for readings, and if they were in a hurry to get back, Charley let some of them jump the line.  I happily accepted barter, including hand-knit socks, a hand-thrown mug, a stained glass suncatcher, and an endless supply of grilled sausage, onion and pepper subs, in exchange for readings.  Our cash profit was a bit over $300.00, ten times our investment.  We were hooked.

  The guys who had the sub booth did it again at a few more Forest Fairs, until they got the financing to open The Marx Brothers’ Cafe in Anchorage.  They told us to come by any time we needed a free meal.  I started setting up my crate and pillows in the back of the flea market booth, and expanded to a summer round of festivals all over Southcentral Alaska.

  Wherever I went, I was at first the only psychic working there.  Christian fundamentalists would protest to the organizers and promoters, and twice my reservations were cancelled and my deposit returned:  by an Anchorage civic group for an event at the Hotel Captain Cook (I typed “Hotel Captain Hook” first, a popular old sobriquet), and by the University of Alaska for their Arts Fair.  Others, including Girdwood, didn’t cave in to the pressure, and within a few years other psychics were coming out for the festivals.

  The fair and its park changed.  Tennis courts, swing sets, gravel picnic pads and paved paths were put in.  A permanent stage and sound booth replaced the old flat bed trailer and rickety lean-to.  My favorite pad was reserved for me every year.  Crowds grew bigger and signs went up:  “No dogs or religious orders allowed.”

  At the sixth annual Girdwood Forest Fair, one nervous paramedic or another would drop by every half hour or so to ask me how far apart my contractions were, but I knew they were only Braxton-Hicks contractions.  Doug wasn’t born until three weeks later.  The following summer, and the one after, I held him on my lap and nursed him while I read cards.  I was an activist for bringing breastfeeding out of the closet, just as I was for psychic reading.

  In Girdwood, sometime around 1990, the year that there were nine psychics working, it was the last straw for the fundies.  They showed up en masse at a village council meeting that winter and demanded that we all be ejected permanently.  I heard about the flap second and third hand.  People went to bat for me. 

  The compromise that was reached was that everyone else would be barred, but I would be grandfathered in for as long as I kept showing up, because I had been there from the first.  If I ever stopped, nobody would be allowed to take my place.  I kept doing the Forest Fair until 2001…   or ’02, when I wasn’t physically able any longer.  One organizer who had been there from the start pleaded with me, offered assistance, wanted so badly to keep the tradition going, but I had to express my regrets and stay home. 

  Media have reported that there will be no Girdwood Forest Fair this year.  Insurance expenses, protests from villagers disturbed by the crowds, traffic, drunks shooting fireworks and passing out in their yards, etc., brought it down at last.  It was good while it lasted, the Goodwood Fair, the Rain Forest Fair… my first.
  

  This is my response to the first of two Featured_Grownups topics for January of 2009:  First of All….

  …to blog about a first. It can be any first: first tooth, first step, first boyfriend/girlfriend, first time, first spouse, first child, first time to conquer the world in some alternate gaming universe.

  • 6:59 pm
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