Marilyn Sukonick-Zeff’s story starts in a Barnes & Noble. On a whim, many moons ago—as she says—she took her two children for story hour at the national bookstore and noticed there would be a tarot card reader coming in to promote selling the cards. The experience intrigued her so much she asked for a private reading with the woman on a different date.
“I thought it would be interesting to go see,” Sukonick-Zeff says. “There was a logical explanation for what was in the cards, and that struck a chord with me because I’m a logical thinker.”
After that reading, she returned to Barnes & Noble, purchased a pack of tarot cards, and is now an incredibly successful tarot card reader—so successful she doesn’t even have a website, working solely by word of mouth.
Once she purchased the cards, she immediately sought out businesses, checking out a restaurant in the Huntingdon Valley that hosted a woman who gave tarot readings every Tuesday. She began subbing for her and eventually got two evenings a week of her own; things spiraled from there.
Sukonick-Zeff stresses that she is not a psychic; she’s a professional card reader who simply reads the cards and interprets the cards to help people understand what they’re projecting. “The cards are not predictive, they are reflective,” she says. “They reflect your thoughts, you own hopes, your own desires.”
The experience can be emotional for some. “There is not another job on this earth with a definition of being able to touch people on such an intimate level in a short period of time,” Sukonick-Zeff says. “The experience is twofold. It’s not just for them, but for me too.”
Along with tarot card reading, SukonickZeff does numerology and lip print personality profile readings (people kiss a piece of paper to determine what their personality is like), pendulum readings, handwriting analysis and a number of other live interactive presentations. The only two things she will not address are the lottery and death because it is unethical and unprofessional.
But regardless of what clients decide to hire Sukonick-Zeff for, she says the entire experience is something that will last with them forever. “People remember me,” she says. “They remember meeting me; they remember exactly what I said.”
