Wed, May 26, 2004
'I always trust my cards'
By MIKE STROBEL -- For the Toronto Sun
What a happy coincidence. World Tarot Day, just
as the federal writ drops. Why waste all that time campaigning? Park the buses.
"Liberal majority," says a woman with raven hair
in a corner of Fez Batik, a Peter St. club. It's Tara, the tarot reader. She eyes her cards again. "NDP in second place."
You sure? Team Martin is fading fast. And the NDP?! "I always trust my cards."
Tara Greene digs deeper into her deck of 78. Her
attire is "Queen West faux-gypsy" topped by a jester's hat. More cards turn. More good news for Martin: The Star Card. "The
sky's the limit." The Love card. Then, suddenly, trouble. The Interference card. "Lots of negativism," says Tara. "Inability
to make decisions."
The Wealth card. Well, I'll be, a few Quebec ad
firms drew that one, too. Then the Universe card. "End of the road." But that's five months down the road, after the election.
Hmmm. Can you impeach a PM? The other guys best not gloat. Gilles Duceppe and the Bloc will finish dead last. They draw the
Devil card. "They're dealing with their own shadows."
Stephen Harper and his Tories may be runners-up
(a second deck shuffle shows.) Then the Lust card joins the Harper pile. "Might be a scandal," says Tara. The next card up
is the Princess of Disks, who is pregnant. Naaaaw.
Meanwhile, Jack Layton is all over the map, as
usual. Jack gets the Fool card, but that's good in tarot. "He'll do better than everybody thinks," says Tara, who is 52, but
looks 40. "His energy really connects." Uh, how you gonna vote, Tara? "NDP." Aha. She points to the cards. "But with
these, I'm totally impartial."
And, sure enough, Layton starts drawing dodgy
cards. Ruin. Defeat. Strife. "People will start looking into his secrets. He hits some walls." Hit the road, Jack. Unless
that first shuffle was right, and you're about to become the Official Opposition. You really sure about this stuff, Tara?
"Sometimes I wish we could be like the weatherman
and say there's a 40% chance or whatever."
She has an easy laugh. Sometimes her eyes twinkle,
which helps when she tells you to go out at night, breathe energy into the ground, then up to a star and make a wish. She
tells me of mysterious things. How as a child she kept dreaming of JFK, before the assassination. How she smelled trouble
before September 2001, because Saturn was opposite Pluto. How her crystal ball once vanished into thin air at a Casa Loma
job. "Where's my cards?" she asks, a bit panicky. We search around. Early bar-hoppers are trickling in. "Oops," she says.
"Here they are." She's been sitting on them.
She takes a quick read on my life, first whirling
small crystals eight times around the cards. "You're dealing with new people, foreigners." And "you need to be a pioneer."
Aw shucks. And "people notice when you walk into a room." Of course they do. I'm a big, tall guy with a shaved head.
Tara has been reading tarot since 1991. She knows
every detail of every card and adds intuition. But the answers lie within, she says. "I'm a counsellor, a therapist in a way.
I'm just interpreting." A private gig, an hour and a half or so, costs $150. She does a lot of corporate parties, from Amex
to Cirque du Soleil. (See taratarotweb.tripod.com)
Tarot is hot. "It's evolved as a balance to all
the rationality of the world," says Tara. "People are looking for meaning."
So I hope you had a good World Tarot Day yesterday.
Sorry I forgot to get you a card
Tara Greene Rants and Raves 
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