Giovanna has been in the “psychic” business for 17 years. From everything I’ve read online, she’s got a fairly good track record: decent reviews overall and a client base that seems to keep coming back.

Beyond being attractive and charismatic, Giovanna has a boisterous demeanour about her; if I didn’t know she was a physic I might have mistook her for some gossipy Italian soccer mom. (Looks can be deceiving.)

Today when we arrive at her Yonge St. studio, Giovanna greets us wearing jeans and a pink cardigan. She looks slightly disheveled, as though she just got back from a hard day of shopping at the Eaton’s Centre. I’m slightly disappointed, as I assumed she’d be wearing something a little more mystic looking like a head-dress or a cape or an eye patch.

She asks us what we’d like done today and we tell her we’d each like to have an individual tarot card reading ($40 a pop). John stays seated in the waiting room, which looks like the bedroom of some seventeen year-old acid head, and I follow Giovanna to a tiny side room off the main foyer. Once seated, Giovanna takes out her tarot cards, asks me to cut the deck in half, and proceeds to tell my fortune.

During our 25 minutes together, Giovanna tells me many things, most of which goes in one ear and out the other. I can recall a lot of the same remarks from the other reviews I read online earlier: “I see you working abroad.” “There’s definitely real-estate in your future.” “One of your parents is not healthy.” A couple times she sends a text message during my reading, and at one point lets out a long, loud yawn.

John’s reading is no better. He gets the same, banal, copy and paste kind of assessment. Before he knows it, he’s back in the waiting room with me, handing over his $40 to Giovanna. Sucker.

Neither us of really expected to encounter a legitimate psychic today. But we did expect to be entertained; a little smoke and mirrors in this context could have gone a long way. Instead we got a soccer mom in jeans and a pink cardigan.