Miss Cleo has left the building.

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Diego
Posts: 517
Joined: June 16th, 2008, 11:29 am

Miss Cleo has left the building.

Postby Diego » July 26th, 2016, 3:53 pm

News reports from Florida say that TV informercial psychic, "Miss Cleo", (aka Youree Harris) died early today from cancer. She was 53,

A decade or two ago, her informercials, which made money for the promoters for a time, were later the fodder for comedians, and later legal investigations as well.

performer
Posts: 3508
Joined: August 7th, 2015, 10:35 pm

Re: Miss Cleo has left the building.

Postby performer » July 26th, 2016, 5:15 pm

The trouble is with these things is that the psychic often doesn't make any money from them. Whoever promotes the service often does though. I have no idea about the situation with Miss Cleo.

The psychic phone lines are also prone to problems. They often go broke and the psychics don't get paid!

Come to think of it I was featured myself on a psychic TV infomercial shown all across Canada in the middle of the night. It was quite amusing but I don't think it got me much outside business. I always find newspaper publicity has always got me more business than anything else. I have had a tremendous amount of it as a psychic. Frequent full page articles on my work and double page spreads not infrequent either. And of course dozens of smaller articles along with many television and radio appearances.

But as a psychic rather than as a magician. Strange how that works.

Mindipulator
Posts: 1
Joined: August 8th, 2016, 12:33 am
Favorite Magician: Bob Cassidy / Max Maven / Richard Osterlind

Re: Miss Cleo has left the building.

Postby Mindipulator » August 8th, 2016, 12:49 am

I worked briefly as a Miss Cleo psychic about 16 years ago.

We were paid $18/hr. They billed the callers around $300/hr.

We were employed by "bookshops" so we were not direct employees of the promotors or any psychic network.

I was very good at keeping the caller on the line, the major requirement, so I would have a new call come through as soon as one ended.

I made pretty good money. As a chronic insomniac I had nothing else to do in the wee hours. It became too depressing though when I
realized how much these people were paying to talk with me. Especially since so many were calling about finances. Had to quit.

Miss Cleo was only an actor with a fake accent who got paid to make a series of very successful informercials.

performer
Were you in the JoJo Savard spots?

performer
Posts: 3508
Joined: August 7th, 2015, 10:35 pm

Re: Miss Cleo has left the building.

Postby performer » August 8th, 2016, 6:35 am

$18 an hour is very low money indeed. Especially when the clients are being charged $300.

I would never work those psychic phone lines. The idea of keeping someone on the line to get more money out of them crosses an ethical boundary for me and I just couldn't do it. I do have to sleep at night. And they can run up incredible bills that they can ill afford. However, I did have a psychic phone line in Ireland but I didn't have to be there! It was voice activated and there was a time limit to the calls of only a few minutes. For a few years I was even sent royalty cheques from Ireland all the way to Canada until the company was sold for a million quid or something.

My voice would come on and say, "Look at your head line. Is it long or short?" The caller would answer and then my voice would come on and ask more questions and according to the answer would get the correct palmistry response. And I did it with the Tarot line too. I had four different psychic phone lines. One for palmistry, one for tarot, one for the I Ching and one for Numerology. In addition to this I also had 12 astrology phone lines depending on which sign of the zodiac you were. All voice activated. The deal was that I would contact newspapers and do their astrology columns. In return I would get free advertising space for my four main phone lines. Then under each zodiac sign in the newspaper horoscope I would put the phone number for the sign in question.

I was very famous in Ireland as a psychic with tons of newspaper publicity, including full page and even two page newspaper spreads on occasion. So naturally as a result I was very busy doing readings. There were no such things as psychic fairs in Ireland although they do have one day affairs nowadays.

In Canada I did and still do the psychic fairs. And strangely enough the svengali deck helps me tremendously in getting readings at these events. Counter intuitive I know but it works and works very well. I am a showman type psychic and it helps me in my work although I wouldn't necessarily recommend anyone else goes this route.

I was never involved with Jo Jo Savard. However, I was indeed involved in a psychic infomercial which was shown all over Canada in the middle of the night. I still have the videotape of it. I did it for a psychic friend of mine although I never took the phone calls myself. He did have some inside knowledge of the Jawdroppers magic infomercial and it did very well indeed.

Which reminds me. I also had a magic phone line as well as the psychic related ones. It was a complete failure! However, the psychic lines worked great!

performer
Posts: 3508
Joined: August 7th, 2015, 10:35 pm

Re: Miss Cleo has left the building.

Postby performer » August 8th, 2016, 6:51 am

Here is an article from the Irish Times in 1998. One of my phone line does get a fleeting mention along with a few others.
http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/dial- ... c-1.198202

In case you miss it here is the relevant paragraph:

"There are at least eight psychic service providers in the Republic. In addition to IPL, callers could try Mystic Meg Tarot, Tarotel, Ali's Tarot, Mark Lewis Tarot, Sonya's Tarot Line, John Little Classic Tarot or The Mystic Network. Some are recorded voices that choose the cards for you, some ask you to choose your cards by using the touch-tone buttons on the phone; another asks you to choose your cards by answering "stop" after given tones, while a few are answered by live readers who pass their hands over the cards, choosing the ones beneath their hand when you tell them to stop."

Jack Shalom
Posts: 1368
Joined: February 7th, 2008, 12:00 pm
Location: Brooklyn NY

Re: Miss Cleo has left the building.

Postby Jack Shalom » August 8th, 2016, 10:05 am

The deal was that I would contact newspapers and do their astrology columns


Mark,

I would think that it would be very tedious to grind out a daily horoscope column every day. Did you just crib it from somewhere or did you actually write the damn things yourself?

performer
Posts: 3508
Joined: August 7th, 2015, 10:35 pm

Re: Miss Cleo has left the building.

Postby performer » August 8th, 2016, 10:54 am

I wrote them myself. You can't plagiarise respected astrologers and reproduce them in newspapers! All hell would break loose when they found out! I didn't mind forging authors signatures in magic books or selling sub standard svengali decks to the unwashed public that they would never be able to master but that was a different business entirely. So no. I did write them myself and it WAS tedious! I was happy to give it up.

However, for a while I got Lisa Close to write them under my name although she didn't know anything about astrology and they weren't bad but not quite as good as mine. Still, I was getting away with it. Of course she got fed up with it too so I hired a professor like yourself (I think you are a professor of some sort) and he was bloody useless writing things like "do the garden today". One publication noticed that the quality of the Horoscopes were going down rapidly and expressed some concern about the matter. So I had to go back to writing them myself.

LIsa used to work for me all over Canada at the psychic fairs. Most psychics in Ontario know exactly who she is. She would do Chinese Numerology (which I taught her) for potential clients and to my horror would do it all wrong. Of course it didn't make the slightest bit of difference with everyone telling her how accurate she was and she was so inundated with it that she got fed up with that too.

It has not escaped my notice that although she is involved with MUM magazine she does not write an astrology column therein.


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