By her own tally actress Lauren Tom has sought counsel from over 50 psychics in the last 20 years. “My father believed strongly in certain people’s ability to see the future, so he used to drag me to some of his visits,” she explains. “I thought the whole thing was kind of weird. But then my father died–at a relatively young age–and I began to wonder where he went, what had happened. I saw one psychic, then another. It became a consuming passion, to understand myself better through these seers. Needless to say, I went through lots of extremely wacky experiences.”
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About five years ago Tom was asked by HBO to develop a one-woman show. “They were looking for personal stories from people of color,” she says, “but I didn’t think I had an interesting story to tell.” While speaking with a producer, Tom brought up her spiritual encounters. “‘That’s it,’ he said while laughing, ‘your life as seen through these sessions,’” says Tom. “And since I didn’t mind setting up myself as a fool, as a gullible truth seeker, I said yes right away.” Originally a skit titled “25 Psychics”–“because I didn’t want it to be a laundry list of all 50 or so”–Tom has expanded it into an hour-long show that evolves as she incorporates new psychics and the latest events in her life.
Though her mother married into a well-connected merchant family in Chinatown, Tom never lived in the city. Instead she was raised in Highland Park, where she took dance lessons and longed to be Jewish. “Oh, how I envied my friends for their bas mitzvahs.” In 1980 she went to New York and landed a role in A Chorus Line, but after that gig ended, she found there was little acting work for Asians. Eventually directors Peter Sellars and Joanne Akalaitis, advocates of color-blind casting, took her under their wings, and in 1989 Tom made her local stage debut at the Goodman in Akalaitis’s reworking of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Debra DiPaolo.
