The future is now for Crush tarot card reader and woman of mystery

By Anne Marie Distefano

The Portland Tribune, Apr 14, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009

In the dim light, under a dramatic application of makeup, Wanda Weegie appears to be a handsome woman. But Wanda also is a witch Ñ a white witch, she insists.

“White magic,” she says, “can do no harm to anybody.” She materializes at Crush every Wednesday night, in a jeweled turban and fringed shawl, to read tarot cards, create charms and concoct love potions.

A nightclub may not be the first place you’d look for a mystical experience, but the setting works. Crush is set up on multiple levels, and long swaths of fabric transform a platform into a fortuneteller’s tent. The flickering candles, low cocktail tables and long, soft sofas would do for a sŽance, although I don’t believe the ancients employed a disco-leaning DJ to invoke the spirits.

Wanda’s past is shrouded in mystery. “I have some parts of the past that I like to keep very personal and secret,” she explains, “because there have been circumstances that I don’t feel comfortable talking about, but I share as much as I can É I have a very interesting life, yes, yes.”

To understand her story, you have to be able to imagine the way she tells it, her tone and her accent. Wanda’s voice is deep, with rolling R’s, sibilant S’s and lots of elongated vowels. She wouldn’t say, “I’m coming to dinner”; she’d say, “I cohme to dee-nar.”

A band of gypsies was traveling through Romania when they discovered the 4-year-old Wanda running wild with a pack of wolves. The kindly gypsies made her one of their own, and took her to their homeland in Bulgaria. There, she says, she began to learn their mystical ways. Later, she was ostracized from the band, and made her way to South America and then north to Portland. She says this explains her strange accent Ñ the Eastern European intonations sometimes slip into a Spanish lilt.

Before she begins the night’s readings, Wanda sets up her altar. Tokens represent the four elements: a dish of salt stands for earth, incense symbolizes air, and there’s a glass of water next to a candle burning for the element of fire.

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