The Psychic and the Fat Ladies

John Edward

Last night my husband and I paid handsomely to see the former star of Crossing Over With John Edward in the flesh. I never saw his TV show, which aired from 1999 to 2004, but had heard all about the alleged psychic medium and was intrigued. And with the cloak of a Maine winter still heavy upon our shoulders, we eagerly seized the opportunity to enter another dimension, even for just two hours.

The most notable, and the day after most memorable, feature of the event, struck us immediately: The audience was at least three-quarters female, and of those women, well more than half were morbidly obese. Not just fat but all the way to ginormous. (My husband's word.) It was scary. Who were all these women and why had they all assembled in this local college auditorium at this appointed hour? Did fat women have a greater interest in communicating with the dead? Who knew? Once we adjusted to that oddity we settled in for some magic which never wholly materialized.

For the first 45 minutes Mr. Edward engaged in personable banter, sort of like a stand-up comic who wasn't trying to be funny. (He succeeded, although some of the audience members he chose to interview were a hoot.) Eventually, after telling us in stunning detail the circumstances of how his mental gifts had been revealed to him in childhood, he got around to displaying his talent. This consisted of closing his eyes, receiving instructions in his head from dead people, then asking things like had anyone in the audience ever been lost, or ever needed to be rescued, or knew someone whose name started with an S or maybe an SK sound or perhaps a B, or had ever a dog named Beau, maybe a German Shepherd. Whoever answered in the affirmative was quickly handed a microphone by one of the roving assistants and the questioning continued, with Edward telling that person things about him or herself they already knew, or maybe didn't know yet but might soon. One man was quite upset when Edward asked him, "Is your daughter Kate pregnant?" Turned out the daughter was indeed named Kate but the pregnancy, if true, was news to him.

And so on.

Not having been chosen for a reading, which was what Edward called his ability to pick random brains, I was mostly focused on how hungry I was and where we would eat after the event, although all the fat ladies dampened my appetite, eliminating pizza as an option.