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My Turn		NEWSWEEK FEBRUARY 16, 2004
Out of the Candlelight And Into the Spotlight		At the ceremony, I joyfully wept at having had a hand in the young couple's destiny. But during the toasts, the bride stood up, lifted her glass, and said, "It was my psychic, Rochelle Shapiro, who brought Steve and me together." The photographer shone his lights on me. Guests began to rush towards me as if I were the Viennese table. "Will my son-in-law pass the bar exam this time?" one demanded. "Is my dead father around me?" another asked. "Can I take you to the track with me?" another said. I was so unnerved that I would have left the catering hall right away, but I had to stop at the ladies room. "She’s in here," I heard a woman say. “I recognize her shoes,” and in a moment, I saw a face peering up at me from under the stall door. "Where can I find a husband?" the woman asked. "I'm next for the psychic," another woman argued. There was a crowd out there. I heard a man's voice say, "We should take numbers!" A man in the ladies room! I had gone from being a phone psychic to a Toilet Psychic! To promote Miriam The Medium, I’m going to have to really mingle, but how can I mingle when it’s dangerous for me to even get close to my own clients? Once, a client we'll call Linda begged me to make an exception and let her come to my house for a reading instead of doing it on the phone. "I need to be close to you when you contact my mother's spirit," she pleaded. She sounded so distraught that I finally gave in, and after the reading, she looked so much happier that I was glad I'd done it and even considered working in person more often. She wanted to come back for another reading in two days, but I didn't have an appointment available for two weeks. "I'll just have to hold out," she sighed. The next day, when I stepped out my front door, Linda jumped out of my rhododendron bush. "Mama!" she cried, and threw her arms around me as tight as a vise. After that, I couldn't help but look over my shoulder every time I left the house. Although the character in my novel is a psychic, I don’t want to promote the novel by using my gift. I work by candlelight, not spotlight. My gift might leave me if I misuse it. I use it to help people, not to sell books. I want to continue to have my psychic practice, but I want to use my other gift, too, the one I also practice in quiet when I’m alone—writing.
Once people find out about my psychic ability, they no longer want friendship, they want the future
by Rochelle Jewel Shapiro I dreamed I was in Barnes & Noble, doing a reading of my very first novel, Miriam The Medium. The audience was filled and smiling expectantly and as soon as I stopped reading, people quickly rose from their seats. Whipping out my pen, I sat down at the table, ready to sign copies. But the growing throng heading towards me, jostling each other, overturned the table. They had no books in their hands for me to sign. Instead their hands were outstretched, grabbing for me. “We aren’t your readers,” they shouted. “We came to be read by you!” I woke up in a sweat. This dream was my waking nightmare, the one thing I was terrified would really happen. In May, I’m supposed to go out in public and be a presence to promote my novel. This means walking into stores and groups and talking to people, and while I’m happy to talk plot and character, I’m afraid people will ask me where I got my subject matter, how I did my research, and I don’t actually believe in psychics, do I? Well, the fact is, I do. My Russian grandmother, who called herself a healer, was a psychic before me. One look in people’s eyes, and she could tell what was troubling them. Everyone respected her, especially me. “You have my gift,” she told me, and I believed her. But as I got older, being psychic was suddenly too Old World for me. I wanted to do something up-to-date, to work in an office and write on the side, so after college, I wrote summaries of books for a small	magazine for awhile and then taught middle school. But wherever I went, my psychic abilities came with me. I knew too much about other people and that caused trouble. I was gossiping with a coworker by the water fountain when I suddenly blurted out, “Congratulations! When is the baby due?” And then I saw a funny look on her face and

	I knew she hadn’t told anyone. “Who told you?” she demanded. “I don’t remember,” I lied. A couple of days later, over lunch, I was moved to tell another coworker, “I’m sure your father is going to be fine.” “What are you talking about?” he said. “My father is perfectly fine.” An hour later, he got a call that his father had been in a car accident and was in the ICU at St. Vincent’s. As it happened more and more, I finally had to admit, “I’m psychic,” and once I came out, people no longer wanted friendship from me. All they wanted was their future. It wasn’t until I married a man who truly loved and appreciated me as well as my gift that I gave in and became a professional psychic, but a psychic in hiding. For over twenty-five years, I’ve done my best to keep my gift a secret because of how people react. I work over the phone. All but my closest friends think that I make my living solely as a writer when actually I depend upon my psychic gift to support me, but I have to guard it with my life. I was once coaxed into attending the wedding of a woman who felt my reading had led her to her husband-to-be. "Only if I can be incognito," I told her. "Of course," she said. "Anyway, I want all the attention on me." "Say I'm a friend of the family and not a psychic," I told her, and she promised.