What could be less Vegas?

By Joe Brown

Thursday, May 22, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Las Vegas is famously otherworldly. The whole reason for the place is getting away from it all, going out of your head.

This is the Oblivion Express: Suffused with drink and dazzle, most of the Strip’s entertainment offerings are designed to distract, make you forget your woes — make you forget you’re human.

But a recent apparition on the Strip’s entertainment landscape does just the opposite. It puts your mind on your sorrows, forces you to remember.

Psychic headliners John Edward and Sylvia Browne, materializing monthly in sold-out engagements at the Flamingo and Excalibur respectively, summon the very things people come to Vegas to escape, or at least forget for a weekend. Dead children. Abuse. Suicide. A litany of symptoms, from pulmonary edemas to cancer. And on and on, for up to $175 a head.

There’s nothing else on the Vegas entertainment landscape to remind audiences of the reality of being human. (Well, maybe the “Bodies” exhibit at the Tropicana, but even there the preserved female corpse is wearing high heels.)

Vegas does have a long history of extrasensory hucksterism — from the Amazing Kreskin to Uri Geller to Criss Angel, magicians and mind readers and mentalists have been passing through for decades.

But psychics as a headline act, as destination performers, this is something else.

For the casino entertainment bookers, the phenomenon is a no-brainer: low to no-cost production, built-in audience, promoted by the psychics themselves on TV and on their Web sites.

But something deeper is going on here. Right in the noisy, garish heart of the casinos, within this carnal carnival of denial, there’s a darkened room where people bring their grief and pain and loss. It’s the anti-Vegas.

• • •

There’s an unusual quiet in this showroom at the Flamingo, an anxious hush as the full house, nearly 700 people, waits for John Edward to appear. Also odd for a casino show: No alcohol is being served. An assistant takes the stage and explains the ground rules to the crowd: Edward will call out a section or a row, and if a verbal cue strikes a chord, the subjects are to raise their hands and a microphone will be brought to them. Answer only yes or no to Edward’s inquiries. No oversharing in the excitement and emotion of the moment.

“That’s my job,” Edward says, as he walks out to applause.

His mike suddenly goes out. “Your batteries are dead,” jokes a woman from the suddenly very vocal audience. A cosmic joke.

“Once in San Francisco, all the lights went out and I had to do almost the whole event with a bullhorn,” Edward says.

Edward tells us this is a “group reading” and explains clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience. At 38, regular-guy handsome in his untucked blue shirt and jeans, he’s a psychic dreamboat, a fast talker with a Long Island tang. He’s in a tangible hurry to get to as many visiting spirits as possible, but he’s patient and reassuring with the living.

“You want to know that your family and friends are OK,” he tells them. “You want to know they survived this thing called physical reality. This is important: They do not miss you.”

• • •

Edward’s crowd is presold — this is a destination event for many in the audience. He’s famous for the internationally syndicated TV shows “Crossing Over With John Edward” and “John Edward Cross Country,” and appearances on the Home Shopping Network. There are very few skeptics in this bunch — not at these prices. (In a phone interview, Edward confides that sticker shock keeps drunks and debunkers from veering into his events and spoiling the pity party.) People are palpably eager, even desperate, in hope that he will be tuning in their loved ones. This leads to some false starts. Edward warns against waving arms, pleading “Pick me, pick me!”

“That is what I call being a ‘relative stealer,’ ” he says. “You guys are laughing, but these are all real things that happen.”

The session begins on the lighter side, and Edward displays the touch and timing of a stand-up comic.

“Is his wife still living?” he asks an elderly woman after declaring that her disembodied ex-husband has popped in.

Which one? she says. He had three of them.

“He’s telling me the one that never shut up.”

Which one? Big laugh.

But much of what comes up is grim, if not downright gothic. As the material darkens, Edward modulates swiftly into the suede-voiced tones of a counselor or grief therapist.

“Who has the cancer connection?” he calls out, pointing to a section in the back. “Is the person that has the suicide connection over here?” “The baby that didn’t make it here is with us on the other side.”

A man and a woman tentatively raise their hands. They lost their 2-year-old son to leukemia last month.

All the air leaves the room in a collective gasp.

“Boo, or Boo Boo?” Edward probes. They nod. “He likes what you were singing to him.”

It’s a goose-bumpy moment. This is Vegas turned inside out. A supersized group therapy. The audience is the show.

What they leave with is reassurance, acknowledgment. And waves of sympathy from fellow audience members — which may be the real payoff of this otherwise inexplicable psychic showbiz.

• • •

What Edward’s audience really wants is to ask questions, and he allows ample time for Q&A. One woman in his audience says she has been on the waiting list for a personal consultation for six and a half years (after Vegas, he travels to London, Washington, D.C., and Anchorage, Alaska).

It’s a similar situation with veteran psychic Sylvia Browne, 71. She’s in town for several days each month, and her afternoon seances at the Excalibur are a more downscale affair, staged in a theater that just the night before housed the distinctly corporeal beefcake parade known as Thunder From Down Under.

Browne sits on a throne center stage, warms up with a folksy 30-minute metaphysical chat, and gets to the main event of her two-hour shift, answering questions. Nearly 75 people line up on both sides of the room and approach the throne to ask a question. Browne snaps off pat answers in her gravelly grandmotherly way, and the questioner often gets back in line to ask another.

Though the psychic headliners take different approaches, the heart of the matter is the same for Edward and Browne, in Vegas or anywhere in the world.

“I lost someone close,” someone will say. “What do they want to tell me?”

“That I can’t do,” Edward answers. “I can’t dial direct.”