The realm of the “woo-woo” is, by nature, ineffable. There are spirits and “The Secret,” Reiki and reincarnation. Even when you host a podcast called “Woo Woo,” as the comedian and actor Rachel Dratch does, the subject might be easiest to define in self-defense. “Anything that, when you talk about it, you have to preface with, like, ‘Look, I don’t want to get all woo-woo,’ ” she said the other day. “That’s my little litmus test.”
Dratch, who wore an all-navy outfit with a small bird-pendant necklace, was exploring Stick Stone & Bone, a West Village boutique that hawks woo-woo wares: gems, jewelry, incense. Nose-ringed clientele browsed quietly; jazzy piano twinkled softly from above. The shop had been recommended by Amy Poehler, Dratch’s close friend and podcast guest. On the show, Dratch and her co-host, Irene Bremis, a comedian and Dratch’s high-school pal, are regaled by familiar faces’ woo-woo tales: Tina Fey’s spooky Jersey vacation town, Will Forte’s Ouija high jinks, Gloria Steinem on the intuition of the oppressed. Dratch said that Poehler is, generally, “the ultimate skeptic” of woo-woo-ness.
In early episodes, Dratch professed a wariness of her own. It has since waned. “The more stories I hear, the more open I become,” she said. “There’s no cost to it.” It’s also a practical approach. “If a guest tells their story, I don’t want to step in and be, like, ‘Well, that was probably just the wind,’ ” she said. “For the sake of the pod, we often believe that nothing has a scientific explanation.” Her father, she noted, was a radiologist. “I want to put a little disclaimer, like: I’m a person of science!” she added. “But we sort of walk the line, I guess.”
She eyed shelves displaying sage sticks and evil-eye paraphernalia. Her own woo-woo experiences, she said, have been few but formative. Almost a decade ago, on a group jaunt celebrating her former “Saturday Night Live” castmate Ana Gasteyer’s birthday, a tarot reader grimly, and correctly, told Dratch that she’d lose a family member within six months. “There’s the dark side of getting a reading,” Dratch said. “It has to be someone that you know isn’t going to wreck your girls’ trip.”
A psychic reading on Dratch’s forty-third birthday went better: in the next six months, she would meet someone, the soothsayer declared, and they would have a child. “I was, like, Eh, I bet she says that to a lot of ladies,” Dratch recalled. Four months later, at an East Village dive, a man chatted her up; within a year and a half, they had a son, Eli. (This inspired the title of her 2012 memoir, “Girl Walks Into a Bar.”) She had known that, in her forties, a pregnancy could be fragile. The prediction reassured her. “I just had this feeling, like, Oh, I’m gonna have this baby,” Dratch said. “It was the prophecy.”
Crystals, for Dratch, were terra nova. She approached the counter, where a woman wearing an obelisk necklace presided. “Is the idea that certain crystals hold certain energies?” Dratch asked.
“Yes, because they’re composed of different elements,” the woman explained. “On the Mohs Hardness Scale, you could piezoelectrically test it.” Dratch nodded.
Over years of dinner-party chatter, she collected a trove of others’ unexplained experiences: apparitions in old hotels, successful manifestations. Two years of podcasting has necessitated a restocking. “When we started, I had all these stories stored up,” Dratch said. “Now at every party I’m, like”—she adopted a frenzied, wide-eyed mien—“Have you seen a ghost?! Ever see a light flicker?!”
She plucked a jagged chunk of blue calcite. A label said that it eases congestion. “I’m getting over a cold,” she said. Next, she read about the powers of an amber-colored cuboid called Iceland spar calcite: “ ‘Useful in achieving weight loss’? O.K., we gotta check this out.” She then picked up a smooth stone called citrine. “This has a good feel to it,” she said, and read its label. “Creativity? Imagination? I need that,” she said. “Supports weight loss! Whoa, this is amazing.”
Dratch plopped her basket of crystals on the counter. “It’s my new weight-loss program,” she said.
The cashier rang her up (the haul cost around forty dollars), and noted that the store has been patronized by members of the Yankees, as well as the singer Sam Smith. “They’re so lovely,” the cashier said of the latter. “They literally took one of our huge ones”—she gestured toward a three-foot-tall cluster of amethyst—“under their arm, just like that.”
On the sidewalk, Dratch reviewed her selections. The blue calcite, she said, purports to aid astral projection, a form of out-of-body travel; a podcast guest once recounted an anecdote about someone who claimed to have visited Jupiter’s moons. “Not that I’ve ever achieved that,” she said. She held up her bag of goods. “Well, now I’ve got this.” ♦
