In a corner of the restaurant, past the customers picking over plates of potato skins and crab balls, Miss Betty is predicting the future.
Her wrinkled fingers flash over the green-and-white checked tablecloth as she lays out a row of cards. Queen of clubs. Six of diamonds. Seven of hearts.
She licks her lips and peers through thick bifocals at an anxious hairdresser sitting across from her. "Why do you want this man back?" she asks in a throaty whisper, then lays down a king of clubs. "There's someone better who wants to get back in your life."
Three days a week, 66-year-old Betty Setters sits at this table in the Lansdowne Inn and listens to the dreams, desires, sorrows and fears of those who come to her for guidance.
Whether they seek her regularly, or consult her on a whim after a burger and pint of Bud Light, their questions are more or less the same: Who will love me? What will happen to those I love? Where will the money come from? What will I do with the years of my life?
Dressed in denim shorts and white sneakers, her short gray hair neatly combed, Miss Betty, as she is called here, looks more like a spunky grandmother than any Hollywood image of a psychic. But for nearly four decades, she has been gazing at cards and telling her visions of the future, both joyful and sad.
"I have a third eye. It's like a movie camera," she says. "I do believe I can help people sometimes."
Sitting under a hanging stained-glass lamp, with two decks of cards and a pack of Pall Mall lights resting on the table in front of her, Miss Betty says that she sees a barrage of images, some crisply defined, some vague, when she concentrates on a person's future.
Getting vibrations
She begins each reading by asking her client to shuffle the deck of playing cards while thinking of a wish. "There's a residue of their vibrations on the cards," says the East Baltimore resident, stretching the word "vibrations" to four syllables.
"Sometimes I can pick up the fear from them."
Since antiquity, people have sought the advice of those who claim to be seers. The early Greeks consulted the priestess of the Oracle at Delphi, and the ancient Egyptians asked their priests for prognostications. The prophecies of the 16th-century French apothecary Nostradamus are still frequently referenced - at least by the supermarket tabloids - and modern seers such as John Edwards and Miss Cleo have found fame on television.
