2016 has taken from us another great artist: Miss Cleo. If you don’t know who Miss Cleo is, you’re probably too young to remember phone psychics. You see, in the 90s you could use your telephone, which was plugged into a wall in your home, to call a 1-900 number and pay exorbitant amounts of money to talk to an actor pretending to be a psychic who would tell you who your baby’s daddy is.

Miss Cleo became one of the most well known of these psychics thanks to her over-the-top fake Jamaican accent and her ubiquitous infomercials on late night TV.

...Our new employer was the Psychic Readers Network, a hotline known for its ads starring Miss Cleo, a motormouthed shaman with a lavishly fake Jamaican accent and a streetwise, no-nonsense approach to soothsaying. She was always barking at advice seekers: “Call me now!”

Instead, they called me. That summer, whenever I could, I stayed up all night smoking out the window and guzzling cheap wine while doling out fortunes over a landline. For some reason, the customers expecting Miss Cleo didn’t seem to mind when they got a clueless, depressive 20-year-old from the suburbs instead.

Since I was not actually psychic, the Psychic Readers Network provided me with a minimal script to read and a computer program that simulated a tarot card spread. I used neither. It worked better to make it up as I went along...