Farewell, Medium Rare : High-Tech Astrologer Predicts Well Enough, but Somehow the Old Spirit Is Missing

THIS NEVER WOULD have happened if Annalee hadn’t disappeared.

I’ve always had a weakness for the supernatural. I don’t transchannel Cleopatra, mind you, but I do enjoy a getting a teeny glimpse into the future. Annalee was my psychic. For years, I relied on her “channel of prognostication.”

She was some seer. “A car crash,” she once warned me. “I don’t see you getting hurt, but I see you parked somewhere when you’re hit hard on the driver’s side.” Twelve hours later, the door of my Mazda had a rendezvous with destiny--a.k.a. the Big Blue Bus.

“Ask her when the next earthquake will be,” scoffed my disbelieving husband, whose romantic tendencies she had been correctly tracking, unbeknown to him, for two years.

“October,” said Annalee. October, 1986, came and went, reinforcing Duke’s skepticism. But on Oct. 1, 1987, Whittier’s windows fell into the streets. “She did say October, didn’t she? And she didn’t say what year,” Duke said with begrudged respect.

But by Oct. 17, 1989, when the Bay Bridge collapsed, Annalee had disappeared, her clairvoyant powers unable to foresee a visit by spiritually benighted Santa Monica gendarmes who demanded to see her business license. “Isn’t that just like a magus to vanish into thin air,” Duke jested. But I felt like I’d been abandoned by Mary Poppins. I suppose that I could have left the rest of my life to chance. But as Nancy Reagan wrote, “Why take chances? It may be nonsense, but does anybody really know? And people have certainly been fascinated by astrology for thousands of years.”

I usually don’t listen to Nancy Reagan, but I always listen to my friend Mary. Usually the voice of reason, she badgered me to see her astrologer. “Erin’s as accurate as anyone can be,” said Mary, a writer who wouldn’t submit her book proposal until the moon was in the right place. I thought this was nuts. “If the moon can control the ocean, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out it might have some effect on your life, too.” Mary said. And a major publisher gave her a six-figure advance, on “the very day when Jupiter trined the ninth house.”

So, here I am in Hollywood, sitting in a charming, beautifully appointed old garden apartment (the kind you’d need extraterrestrial guidance to find) with 16-foot ceilings, a fireplace and a lovely view. The former First Lady would feel right at home. Me? I’m staring blankly at a computer printout that looks like a blueprint for a merry-go-round, struggling to stay awake while Erin, a gracious, conservatively dressed ex-model with a Marilyn Quayle flip, methodically reveals the secrets of my natal chart.

“As you well know, you have a Leo sun sign,” she begins, speaking into a studio microphone that, which is hooked up to the surprisingly sophisticated stereo system that’s recording this reading (or should I say, celestial consultation?). This is so mainstream, I marvel.

“In addition to the sun in Leo, you have the planet Pluto there, and Mars there, and south node of the Moon there, too,” Erin continues, hastily assuring me, “Don’t worry if you don’t know what I’m talking about; you hopefully will in a few minutes.”

But it’s been 90 minutes and I’m completely bewildered--overwhelmed by quasi-geometric lingo and hopelessly lost in space. My astrologer believes that “anything in our solar system and beyond can be used as an interpretive factor.” But my life’s too short to worry about the influence of asteroids and planetoids, or whether sun spots cause fluctuations in the stock market. Frankly, if I wanted to know this much about the cosmos, I’d have stayed up late and watched the Voyager transmissions. All I want to know is if I’m going to receive a large chunk of cash. But she keeps talking about the transitting nodes.

I really wish she would go into a trance. When I pay good money for an other-worldly experience, I want mumbo-jumbo; I want drama, smoke, lightning and crystal balls. Perhaps a bearded man in a peaked wizard’s hat and a cloak covered with silver stars. But this earnest, intelligent stargazer in the black patent pumps is so aggressively normal. Annalee spoke in a mysterious voice of indeterminate gender. Annalee did readings in a metaphysical bookstore, behind the rebirthing blankets. But here, the only mystery is whether or not Erin takes MasterCard.

Still, she’s been amazingly accurate about my personality. She even seems to understand what makes Duke tick. I wouldn’t get on an airplane if she said it was a bad day to fly. But I want magic. And mystique.

“Your Mercury is in the sign of Cancer,” says Erin. “I think you’re capable of being rational.” Then why am I tempted to ask her how to find Annalee.