Marrying George Clooney

Years ago, there was an article in New York magazine all about past life regression. This was right up my alley. With an entire past life roadmap I get to a) find out how I came to be who I am in this lifetime, and b) why I make the same mistakes over and over and over again. It seemed like an awfully good way to spend both a major amount of money and a good solid five hours. A few ‘past life readers’ were referenced, but I decide to call and make an appointment with the one who came highly, highly recommended by the author of the article. A French woman, who miraculously had an immediate opening because someone had “just cancelled,” and tells me, in a lovely accent, that she takes cash. I ask if I can write her a check, she says yes, but cash is preferable. I like cash, she says. So do I, I reply.

For those who don’t know anything about a past life regression, you are under hypnosis, hypnotized, but not really. It’s sort of like you’re awake but awake two hundred years ago. Does that make sense?

I’m going to call this woman Francine. This is not her real name, but it’s the only French name I can think of right now. Francine lived in a small apartment that would have made the Collyer Brothers proud. She had newspapers and cardboard boxes piled up so high that I actually wondered if she was getting all her ‘regression’ information from all the front page headlines lying around. It seemed to me she had newspapers from the early 1900’s.

She was a petite, older woman, both very thin, and very stylish. I recall a string of pearls and a lovely large cocktail ring. I also recall that she was in her late seventies, early eighties. She asks me if I’ve ever done this before, I tell her, no, and she is delighted. She leads me to a leather chaise, which is surrounded by more newspapers. She tells me to please lie down, and make myself comfy. She then explains that most issues and problems, including medical and sexual, can be traced to an event or an experience from the past, and can be completely transformed and even eradicated through understanding the initial cause to alter the effect. Even a person who committed a crime, she says, like a crime of passion, or even a serial type killing. Cause and effect she says, but long ago causes, and ‘brand new’ effects, that appear in this lifetime. Like, she says, when you throw a baseball a hundred years ago and it comes back now. Huh. That’s sort of interesting. I know about cause and effect, although and I hate to admit it, I am not at all a baseball fan, so the analogy goes right over my head, literally. She asks me if there is any area in particular I would like to work on, or is this a general regression? I say general because there’s too many areas I would like to work on. It’s usually just one, she says, people have a specific area they want to work on. I don’t know what to say. So, we begin the journey. I am told to close my eyes, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out…slowly … and now imagine that I am floating on a white pillow made of clouds, a cloud pillow. I need to really concentrate, I need to breathe, I need to really envision this white fluffy cloud, and that I am sitting happily, and joyfully with not a care in the world. And she starts counting backwards from like a thousand… nine hundred and ninety nine, nine hundred ninety eight, and weaves some kind of regression ritual into the
counting backwards, and I need to really focus and concentrate on the white cloud pillow, and I need to notice what it is I’m wearing, she says, starting with the feet up. What do the shoes look like that I am wearing? What century? What century, I think? Bergdorf’s, Twentieth. This is all very confusing to me. I’m not sure how this is supposed to work because I am not seeing myself on a cloud pillow, and I can’t see my feet, but as I breathe in and out, I can smell old newspapers. I open my eyes and call time out, and ask her to please, please help me get onto the pillow. I need your help, I tell her I can’t get up on the pillow by myself – I don’t know if it’s supposed to be a cloud pillow, or be a pillow in the clouds. She is now exhibiting frustration toward me. It’s a pillow, she says, a large white cloud pillow, just like a pillow I would buy at say Bloomingdales in their linen department, except it is up in the clouds. Okay. Okay. Okay. I can imagine shopping at Bloomingdales. I close my eyes and I imagine buying a pillow, a big white fluffy pillow with my credit card, and then I imagine the salesperson putting the pillow in a big Bloomingdales shopping bag, and then …then I imagine sitting on that pillow, and try to imagine being in the clouds on that pillow and to tell you the truth I got so exhausted from trying to envision this whole fucking scenario, I think I might have dozed off. Needless to say just like a Valium high. I was woozy, and giddy. I ‘recalled’ about ten past lives, all very strange and weird; one involved a murder, and another where I was a lyricist living in Ireland where my husband held me prisoner in what looked like an outhouse until I wrote lyrics for him because he told everyone in our small Irish village that he was the lyricist when in fact I was the lyricist. Which made me completely understand my issues with ‘giving away credit, as in my own credibility’ in this lifetime. And in another lifetime I was a man, and possibly gay (of course, perfect sense, look at who I was married to prior); and in another I was about to be guillotined, which explains all the arthritic pain I have in my neck in this lifetime, Weird, whacky and quite amazing stuff. And of course, one cannot, I repeat cannot, have a past life regression without having been someone utterly fabulously famous in the past, so it was I – me – who lived in Versailles, although there is no documented proof that it was I – me – who was in fact Marie Antoinette. This is the past life space I occupied on my white fluffy cloud pillow. And it was while I was “living” in Versailles, minding my own business, staring out one of the gazillion windows onto the perfectly manicured garden slash maze, that I began to hyperventilate – in French no less – because for one brief moment when I was both in the past and in the present – which by the way, is a very weird, strange place to be – I thought, “Holy shit, what if this woman – this regression woman – has a heart attack and dies, and I am stuck, literally, in the past?”

Who would I be? Would I be Marie Antoinette, but be in my present body? Would I start wearing long puffy dresses and wigs, and take the subway to work? Would I have a clue how to get back to the present? Would this become a movie with Michelle Pfeiffer playing me, playing Marie Antoinette? Or maybe, just maybe Robert Zemeckis would sue me for stealing Back to the Future and retelling it from a feminist point of view?

Needless to say, I manage with great difficulty to work through one more past life, this one taking place in the Wild West, where I was working and living in a travelling circus– not unlike the recent HBO show Deadwood – except my entire family, all twelve of them, were all midgets. But not me, I was the ‘normal’ size one.

And for this I paid two hundred and eighty dollars… yes, in cash.