Just as this segment was ending, one of those happy pages appeared in our waiting room and scooped up two people: mom and me. The room, I now realized, was a kind of testing pen. The pages had shut us all up in that room because they were looking for the right person, the right character (read: the right woman). That would be my mom. They walked her down to the front row, middle seat, and sat her down for the show’s next taped episode, this one on how to prepare turkey meatballs. They took me for one reason: I was with mom. They sat me in the thirty-something row up somewhere where it really didn’t matter if I had three heads.
To my great amazement, within minutes Dr. Oz was hand-feeding turkey meatballs to my mom on national television. All the pages were smiling and clapping. They had hand picked her, after all. Mom was beaming.
Then it was all over. Mom walked out giddy over Dr. Oz. I walked out marveling at what amounted to a new, and very old, theatre of the occult. If the Spiritualists had mixed entertainment and mediumship on stage in the nineteenth century, their present day inheritors were now doing it on national TV. It seemed to me that they did so with more or less the same paradoxical, ambiguous, fantastic results, through that surreal brew of trick and truth, fact and fiction, dream and daylight, constructed stagecraft and inherent gift that has long defined the performance of what we so clumsily call “the spiritual.”
Frank Baum would have loved it.
(Watch the episode here.)
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