Psychic Fortune Cookies: Move Over Miss Cleo

Courtesy Kimberly Berg

Those little scraps of paper with prophetic statements like "You will always be surrounded by good friends" are fun to read after polishing off a plate of lo mein (with or without "in bed" at the end.) But no one really takes the fortune cookie for the cookie. Like a daily horoscope, fortune cookie wisdom should be taken with a grain of salt. Unless it's a mini psychic reading created specifically for you by local psychic, Kimberly Berg.

Berg, who has dug deep into the energies of everyone from a seven-year-old schizophrenic on Oprah to contestants on American Idol, started stuffing her personalized readings into fortune cookies last spring, when a friend wanted to give a unique gift to her dinner party guests. Since Berg's professional readings are around $175 a pop, a mini-message inside a cookie was much more cost effective -- and psychically effective.

"My readings can be really intense," says Berg. "I try to provide guidance for your emotional and spiritual development. I get into souls, energy and life patterns. I give insight that's multi-layered."

We know: You'll get the same hullabaloo from your neighborhood palm reader. But this natural born cynic who randomly met Berg at Little Tokyo's Far Bar will personally attest to her "insight." It didn't take her more than a minute to tap into something extremely personal (and shockingly on the money), which was both fascinating and a little unnerving. This sort of thing is a lot easier to swallow with a few bites of cookie.

Berg doesn't even need to meet you or your guests for her Psychic Fortunes. With nothing more than a name, she'll read each person's energy, boil down her thoughts to a couple of sentences, fold the paper and tuck the messages into a fortune cookie (locally made, although not by her). Each one, wrapped in cellophane with the person's name on it, costs $10; they get cheaper if you order in bulk.

They'll probably make an impact, especially when your friend Amelia opens her hand-wrapped cookie and reads, "Amelia is pursuing her expression to her fullest capacity; going to the depths and thus shall have freedom through her craft. Her heart, her art, her truth, her knowing, her life, her self. She is poetry."

Adding "in bed" at the end still works.