Miss Cleo was an advertiser for psychic readings in the early 2000s. I enjoyed watching her commercials. They were over the top ridiculous. She spoke with a Jamaican accent that I thought was authentic. But later I learned that she was not Jamaican. I don't think she ever even visited Jamaica. She claimed to be a shaman from Jamaica. I read later that she had written a play in 1998 called For Women Only, and played a character that was a Jamaican woman named Miss Cleo.
I just loved Miss Cleo and thought she was a scream, not even realizing what a fake she was. I actually believed she was Jamaican. I didn't think she knew the future, and one night I was watching TV with Jim and turned to him to make fun of Miss Cleo. Suddenly the words tripped out of my mouth, "There is about to be a great earthquake." This disturbed me, since I felt that I am no prophet and have no business making prophesies. However, immediately after saying this I had the sickening certainty it was true. The next day, December 26, 2004, there was a 9.1 earthquake off the coast of Sumatra. The first news report was that there were no injuries. I scoffed, and said, "There will be a lot of people killed!" to Jim. And the earthquake caused the Indonesian tsunami that killed 225,000 people. All of this frightened Jim, and it also unnerved me. I was just a little bit spooky.
In the days since then I came to learn that Miss Cleo had died, in 2016 at the age of 53, of cancer.
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